Alumni Isabel Chender: Sustainability Education & Graphic Facilitation

Isabel joined us on our third UnSchool fellowship program in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2016. Since then she has run her own immersive experience in the Amazon and traveled the world doing visual storytelling and a host of exciting projects. We caught up with her to hear more about what she has done over the last four years since she first joined the UnSchool community. 

Can you give us an introduction to yourself and your work?

Hello, my name is Isabel. 

I bring clarity through big picture thinking, most recently as an organizer of sustainability-based education programs and as a graphic facilitator. For the last two years. I have been living in rural Sweden, running the International Youth Initiative Program — a 10 month residential societal entrepreneur training for 18-28 year olds to find their authentic task and be of service to the world. 

In Sweden, photo taken by Per Ingvad in front of friend Rachel Ingvad’s horse painting.

My focus is on designing meaningful learning processes. We consider multiple ways of knowing and work on many levels at the same time: personal, interpersonal, and systemic. The teams I work with create environments for deepening knowledge and collaboration. We ask questions, use participatory leadership approaches, and surface collective wisdom through listening, conversation, creativity and action planning. 

In Colorado, Photos taken by Clinton Spence of Tara Mandala Retreat Center where I was graphic facilitating for a conference.

You can find me engaging in dialogue about social and environmental sustainable prosperity and shifting the way we see our opportunities and challenges. I'll probably mention disruptive design, systems thinking, anti-racism, complexity science and/or Buddhist mindfulness at least once — as well as llamas, Pantone’s color of the year, and a beautiful pair of pointy-toed shoes I just saw. I’ll be waving my arms, taking pauses as I speak, bringing out pieces of paper to draw shapes on, and probably trying to convince you to question who you are and what you are doing. In a loving way. 

In Colorado, Photos taken by Clinton Spence of Tara Mandala Retreat Center where I was graphic facilitating for a conference.

What motivates you to do the work that you do?

What education do we need now? What form will allow this intention to thrive and create generative impact? How can we practically and lovingly work towards collective liberation for all beings? How can I live in sustainable cycles? These are some of the questions motivating my life and work at the moment.

I have a deep care for the world and human beings. Since arriving at YIP, I have become more committed to unfolding potential in each other as a way to create social change. 

How did you find out about the UnSchool, and what motivated you to come?

I had just moved to Sao Paulo for four months to work with a project called the Amazon Summer School in the heart of Brasil’s rainforest. This 21-day sustainability leadership education program builds capacities to understand, reflect on and take action in the field of sustainable development. People from all over the world come and fall in love with the forest and its people, gaining inspiration to step into a role of defending this forest for future generations. Everything I had been working with and studying was coming into practice with this work. 

I was curious about what, who, and how social innovation existed in Sao Paulo. I wanted to discover frameworks, mental models and design tools that could support our team to embed the scientific element of sustainability and systems thinking into our program in an elegant way. I had been working as a graphic facilitator and was missing the link between my artistic/facilitation practice and my academic background in Sustainability Systems Science and International Development/Relations. 

My friend Raquel sent me the description for the UnSchool Fellowship program and I kept nodding and saying “yes” as I read it, and so I applied the next day — before I had even realized what I had done!

What was your experience at the UnSchool like?

Fast. Thrilling. Colourful. Lots of information. Equal amounts of action. Deep conversations. Games. Notebooks full of diagrams. Challenge. Joy. Hands-on practice. 

As a process designer, I found new ways to express and deepen my practice. I experienced how  important design is to me and how many ways you can understand what this word means. The graphic design of the materials. The educational model and pedagogical design of the days. The Disruptive Design tools. Life cycle assessments, circular economy - elegant designs for thriving life. I was awed by the cohort of people. Getting to know each one was a gift. Not to mention the mentors, Leyla, and the fellowship hosts. It felt like it was one year and one day all at the same time. 

I also loved how connected to the city of Sao Paulo the program was and how much I learned about the city I was living in. Touring different areas, visiting different buildings and initiatives. I was captivated by all the different learning environments we were invited into.

What was the main take away you had from coming to the UnSchool?

Design is a social scripter that shapes the world. If we design conventions or spaces that invite a different  behaviour, we can change our systems and structures. I repeat this line that I learned there a lot now because it reveals a truth I feel is a needed medicine at the moment.

Human beings who are taken away from their contexts and  living  in oppressive, racist, growth-based systems  behave in ways that are not indicative of what people are capable of. People behave according to the systems that they are invited into. If we were part of  different systems, we would behave differently, in a more aligned way with what I feel our potential is as human beings. 

On a small scale, the way the environment is set up changes the way we experience learning. On a bigger scale, we see how this plays out in  movements for sustainability and social justice, as our system favors some ways of being and not others. We are being called to question our ways of knowing and how we know what we know. Who taught us and how. Why do we believe it? This connects to the idea of “unschooling” and creating new ways of learning.  

From the Fellowship, I took away a lot of questions and ideas about unlearning and how to invite people to participate in different ways of being to be part of  creating  different possible futures. 

Tell us more about your initiative(s), and how is it all going?

It’s an interesting time to run an in-person international residential program for young people. Two years ago, I shifted from being a freelance sustainability and creative consultant to a full-time organizer and program coordinator, wanting to deepen my relationships by working with people and places over time. It has been a joy to work with co-founder Reinoud Meijer, Annie Meijer, and a committed team of educators. 

YIP was created as a response by young people for young people who wanted a different kind of education that allowed them to meet the challenges of today’s world from a practical, intellectual, social and emotional perspective. Our ethos is that we see the world as one interconnected system, and so we are connected to and responsible for everything. From this understanding, we work with the balance between freedom and responsibility. 

The ten-month program is composed of seven course modules: Global Realities; Inner Awareness; Collaboration and Community life; Initiative; Internship; Self-Designed Curriculum and Integration.  We move from the systems of our world, the “why” we want to take action to the “who” wants to create change. We then explore “how” to work together before diving into “what” area we want to work in and “which”skills, capacities and qualities are needed. 

YIP has existed in its physical form for over 12 years! At the moment, we are considering how we can maintain the in-person residential program we cherish while being adaptable and flexible to what Covid19 and its impacts are bringing us regarding the way our systems need to shift and how we need to be in order to support  freedom, health and safety.

In Sweden, photo taken by Maaike Verbanck, one of the YIP participants with the rest of YIP12 in one of our learning spaces - An Outdoor Experience.

Other initiatives I collaborate with are:  The Amazon Summer School in Brasil for sustainability leadership; Movement Vilnius, seeking to redefine physical culture; Fouta Harrisa, an incredible Tunisian company creating  beautiful products while providing livelihoods for local artisans and creating a sustainable alternative in the textile industry; and Brave Space Social Innovation, who I have been working with since before the UnSchool as a graphic facilitator. 

In Brasil, Photo taken by Odenilze Ramos during Amazon Summer School 2018 with all the friends, contributors and participants in the forest classroom.

How did the UnSchool help you start/evolve it?

The UnSchool gave me a set of frameworks, mental models and tools that enhance and support my work as a facilitator. I was part of one of the first UnSchool Educator programs and learned how disruptive design can support problem solving and working with complexity. This has been in the “background” or “blueprint” of a lot of my projects over the last 4 years.

I have used the handbooks, cards, and courses as resources for the participants I work with. Sometimes in my work I feel like a librarian ( in the best way!) — people bring up a topic they are curious about and I direct them to resources. Very often I direct them towards the UnSchool’s in-person programs and online resources so they can deepen their knowledge and activate their capacities for creating social change.

The whole concept of “unschooling” has been a red thread in my work since the 2016 cohort. At that time, I was becoming more aware that I wanted to shift my focus to education rather than consulting. The UnSchool helped me find the language to articulate what kind of education movement  I wanted to be a part of and has connected me to others in this field. For example, I invited Kalina Juzwiak (one of the other UnSchool Fellowship Participants) to be part of the Initiative Forum conference at YIP in 2018 and it was such a joy to work with her! If you haven’t seen her work already, follow her on instagram (@bykaju). She is a huge inspiration for me. 

In Brasil, photo taken by Odenilze Ramos as Raquel (who told me about the UnSchool!) and I are talking about systems thinking and asking questions about leadership.

How have you amplified this change you do in the world?

Like many UnSchool alumni and complexity scientists, I am a big believer in fractals. If you are familiar with the work of Adrienne Maree Brown (who wrote Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism), one of her principles for design is : Small is good, small is all (The large is a reflection of the small). In my work, I hope to create living examples of other possible futures.

I feel the best amplification is through relationships. If I imagine the different people I have worked with and learned from over the years, I think we all carry seeds of the work we are doing. Each YIP participant, contributor, local supporter, project team member, carries this into their future work. It’s interconnected. It might be invisible. I believe in it. 

Writing this interview is probably the most “visible” or tangible amplification I have taken part in over the last 5 years, aside from working with YIP’s social media, where I basically tell stories of what we are doing. So this is a step. 

How can people engage with, support, or follow your work?

Subscribe for the YIP newsletter to hear more about what we are doing. 

Visit the websites of the initiatives I mentioned — read their stories and see how they are working with questions of what it is to be human and live sustainably. Here you can find YIP, Movement Vilnius, Fouta Harrisa, and the Amazon Summer School. 

The Covid-fueled plastic waste crisis unfolding

By Leyla Acaroglu

What a conundrum: we are in the middle of Plastic Free July, whilst also being in the middle of a global pandemic that, due to the increased concerns around safety and hygiene, is demanding the increased use of disposable single-use products. 

In the weeks after the start of the lockdown, Thailand reported a 62% increase in the discarding of disposable plastic products as a result of the pandemic. This is for a country, like many others, who in January had announced progressive approaches to reducing plastic waste. Some recent stats estimate that 13 million tons of plastic waste pre-pandemic would end up in the ocean each year, and now no one knows what the true cost of this surging use in disposable products will have on this global waste crisis. Based on our current trajectory though, it is estimated that by 2040, plastic pollution will weigh 1.3 billion tons. The numbers of disposable personal protective equipment (PPE) being ordered by governments are staggering alone. The UK 28 billion, France 2 billion — and China’s daily production of face masks in February soared to 116 million, which was 12 times higher than the previous month. What will become of all of this disposable plastic waste? 

For every month that we face the Covid-19 pandemic, it is estimated that globally, we will use and dispose of 129 billion face masks and 65 billion plastic gloves. You don't have to go far these days to see the discards of someone else's safety concerns — a dark blue disposable glove lying at the base of a city tree, a light blue disposable face-mask by the side of a trash can, or even worse, various supplies laying limply in the gutter, just waiting to be washed out into the ocean as the street cleaners come and wash it away. 

Before the pandemic, we already had a global waste crisis on our hands, and then the global shutdowns put a halt on progressive action to reduce the reliance on single-use disposable products like disposable food packaging. Given that millions of people are swapping from in-restaurant dining to ordering take-out, we have seen a surge in use of convenience packaging. Add in all the medical supplies, hygiene supplies, and PPE, and all of this has given rise to single-use products skyrocketing at a time when recycling can’t keep up. 

Financial Times called this a “toxic pandemic waste-crisis,” reporting this week that, “A study published on Thursday forecasts that the flow of plastic into oceans would nearly treble by 2040 to 29m tonnes per year if much greater action was not taken by governments and industry.” WHO has said that a 40% increase in PPE production will be needed to meet the growing global demand. 

California has announced they will put their plastic bans on hold due to Covid-19. Wired reports “Even if the industry could handle this crush of ‘recyclables,’ and even if it were economically feasible to process all the stuff, many recyclers have shut down in response to the pandemic. Curbside recycling programs have been suspended by dozens of county and local governments, from Miami to Los Angeles County, according to the trade publication Waste Dive. Recycling facilities are struggling to figure out how to protect their workers, who are concerned about virus exposure from handling materials.” Furthermore, the World Economic Forum states that in the United Kingdom, illegal waste dumping has risen 300% since the pandemic started. 

Most disposable masks are made from finely woven plastic fibers that are not recyclable, but even if they could be recycled, it’s very unlikely that they would, given the issues with recycling medical waste, especially in a time of a highly infectious virus. But there are reports of people wishcycling their masks by popping them in the recycling bin, which in turn, puts sanitation and waste workers at risk. To be clear, right now, unless you find a designated bin that is marked for face masks, they are not recyclable. And, as I have reported on before, recycling validates waste. Given that we are in a global recycling crisis, it is not good enough to rely on recycling as the solution to the complex disposability problem. 

So yes, we are indeed in a conundrum, considering the need for personal safety in the face of a deadly virus as well as planetary protection for current and future generations. More so than ever before, we need ways of meeting these needs through sustainable and circular solutions. 

We need to design our way out of this by creating new products that meet these needs and support the adaptation of these new approaches. 

WHERE CAN WE START?

We know that masks are extremely important for collective safety, and for many people, dining in restaurants is still not possible. Here are 8 ways you can avoid disposable, single-use products: 

1. Get a couple of reusable, washable masks. Wash and rotate them to avoid using single-use ones. (Consider taking up a new hobby by making your own! There are many useful tutorials online.)

2. Encourage your friends and co-workers to do the same with their masks. Consider asking your employer to bulk purchase reusable masks (and even get them branded, if that helps justify the additional costs!).

3. Reuse take-out containers at home for storing other items if you get food to go. 

4. Search out restaurants and delivery services who are making the effort to reduce unnecessary waste and who are selecting lower-impact materials. 

5. Learn to cook new things at home. 

6. If you have to use disposable, store it so that you can reuse it the full number of recommended times, and consider using Terracycle for PPE recycling. 

7. Check this article for more advice on how to stay sustainable during the pandemic. 

---

At the UnSchool we are dedicated to helping create a more sustainable and circular world by design. We run programs, develop tools and support thousands of people in developing their skills, ideas and projects for activating positive change, If you are interested in designing solutions for a sustainable world, then apply to join our upcoming 1 month live masterclass or check out our online programs here. 

8 Ways to Make Online Education Engaging and Interactive

By Leyla Acaroglu

Since we are all now suddenly spending a significant amount of time in online learning environments and digital meetings, and I have been running programs online for several years pre-pandemic, I have been reflecting on what does and does not make online learning work.

Here I have compiled a list of things that I think help make digital learning experiences more effective, as well as things to avoid if you want your participants to be more engaged and motivated through the somewhat more complex 2D world of online learning —  be it in a workshop or even just an online meeting. 

I usually run live online one-month intensive training programs that mirror the core content we teach at any of the UnSchool in-person programs. We started offering these types of intensive online programs a few years back after it was obvious that for some people, getting to a physical location was challenging especially with family responsibilities etc.

Given that we are very committed to equitable access, we started offering a one-month, live, small-group program on the Disruptive Design Method, Systems Change and the Circular Economy and I was fascinated to see how effective these could still be for effective learning and creative change outcomes. 

Since the Covid crises, like many others, we had to suspend all our in-person programs and convert to online. Each time I have now run one of these intensive masterclasses online, the group really amazes me, and I am just as inspired and educated as they are after the program is complete! 

8 ways to stay engaged

Here are eight of the things I have discovered help make online education more effective: 

1. Always get people to introduce themselves in a way that helps the rest of the group be excited about working with them. At the start I give people 2-5 minutes to share who they are and why they are taking the program, along with something weird or wonderful about themselves — the latter always helps break things up and give us a giggle. Laughing is so important for human bonding, and it helps to ease any tensions some participants might have at the start. 

2. Ensure everyone keeps their video on so that everyone can see that everyone else is engaged. Of course, offer people the opportunity to switch it off if they have to pop out, but if you are in a one-hour session, then most people should be visible to help get the benefits of social visual interaction, like mirror neurons. 

3. Break people up into groups and get them talking. If you use Zoom (which we have for years), you can pop people into breakout rooms. It's an amazing feature, as it sends your participants into however many rooms you want for a smaller conversation. So say you can have a group of 10; you can put them in 5 rooms to have one-on-one time or in 3 rooms to have a bit more of a group discussion. You can’t see them unless you pop into a room, and you can call them back at any time to the main room. This helps people process new information, connect with their peers and ensure that they all can participate.

4. Get people doing things. I always pick someone and ask them for an example or to respond to a question, or I get them to write a list of reflections for 2 minutes, or break out into a room and discuss the activity they just did. I also give homework tasks too, then at the start of each session, two or three people share their actions and reflections on the homework task. Interactivity, online or off, is key to cognitive engagement and seeing how others respond to tasks is a very effective peer learning tool. 

5. Keep on time, as it helps respect all people in the group. Especially in a digital environment, people often have to leave right at the end time, and it is always awkward if some pop out before you have finished. So, I work really hard to keep on exactly the time we agreed, and if I have to go over, I make a quick offer for people to pop out if they need and then watch the recorded video later. But I think it's super important to respect the group dynamics by ensuring everyone can be there from start to finish together and say a nice goodbye before rushing off to whatever they have on next! 

6. Use time well. I always plan out my session in chunks of time and make sure I break up any direct instruction so that there is some interactivity. Maybe at the start, middle or end during a lecture session, I will get the participants time to respond or go to a breakout room and do something. In a workshop session, I design several activities around the core learning goals for that session to do alongside the presentation. I often use time restrictions to ensure that when a breakout room happens, they know that they have to be efficient to get the outcomes and then report back when the group reconvenes. 

7. Be understanding. Online learning can be tough for some, as there may be distractions around them or on their computer with seeing messages or emails come in. I understand that kids might start crying or the postman arrives, so let people know that you get it so that if these types of things happen, they don't feel awkward when they have to respond to them. The goal should be that these humans connected via the internet beamed into their homes are supporting each other, gaining the knowledge and experiences that they need from both the instructor and one another and that there is an acceptance that this is not the same experience as being in a room together with the outside world disconnected from our inside learning experience. 

8. Tell stories. This is a good engagement for any type of learning, and the more narrative base information you give, the more likely people are to retain the information that you are sharing. 

3 Things to Avoid

Here are three of the things that I feel reduce the potential for effective digital learning: 

1. Don’t assume that people will be engaged just because they are online; especially now, our attention is often split between many different things. The responsibility of the instructor is to design experiences that are engaging and that motivate participation. Just because someone is in your Zoom room doesn't mean that their mind is present with you, so find ways of ensuring that they are present. I like to see my role as a preforming of exciting learning experiences.

2. Don't get annoyed at people for being late or having not completed a task you asked of them. Online learning is very different from in-person learning when it comes to social pressure, and it can take a bit of time for people to find the motivation to do the work independently instead of in a group dynamic. So, be a bit empathetic to this and give people the opportunity to still contribute, perhaps by emailing it to you later that week for feedback. 

3. It may be that you lose a few people. Given that there are so many different types of learning systems, it's inevitable that one or two people in your group may find online learning just doesn't work for them. We always check on people if they don't show up to a session and try and find out what we can do to help them with their learning journey.  

To be fair, I teach adults and so these ideas apply to adult learning. I think kids and teenagers would have an entirely different set of success features that educators need to bring into their repertoire. I know from my own experience of going from mainly teaching in rooms with humans that the transition can be a bit awkward at first, but for me, the joy in teaching this way is in being able to connect with people all over the world and to have them learn from each other.

When designed well, online learning can have just as profound of an impact as face-to-face programs, ensuring that people have the space to engage and connect with each other and that you, as the instructor, are tracking your content to the learning needs of your group. 

This year, I have already run two month-long programs, and we have a third one coming up this September. I have been so inspired and energized by the outcomes that I am really committed to continuing to find ways of ensuring more people can successfully learn this way.

I don't think digital should replace in-person learning and engagement, as there is just so much cognitive benefit from being with other like-minded humans while trying to solve and uncover complex things. But for now, this is a great way to ride out lockdowns and uncertainty with a group of other humans who care about the same things as you and who are self-selecting into a digital space dedicated to learning how to make positive change. 

If you are interested in joining my next program, the September Circular Systems Design Masterclass, there are still a few places left. Apply here >

Alumni James Sarria: Sustainable Agriculture & Low Tech Education

James Sarria joined us for our San Francisco fellowship in 2017. He is now the director of an organization that works on the SDGs with a Peruvian focus. We caught up with him during lockdown to find out what he was up to and how his UnSchool experience is helping him today. Read on to see what he’s been up to!

Can you give us an introduction to yourself and your work?

I was born in the United States and recently realized my citizenship in Peru as a child of a Peruvian national. I now live there, where I am also a proud uncle and great uncle to five nieces.

My educational training is in urban agroecology and rural community development in Latin America. I currently live in Iquitos, Peru directing the Instituto Perucano, an organization in the Peruvian Amazon that I founded three years ago.

The name Perucano pays respect to my Peruvian heritage and highlights a target population in the Americas to intentionally engage for our work in Peru. Our mission is to facilitate access to professional development initiatives in careers that work towards the Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development goals (SDG’s).

Our theory of change is based on the idea that once Peruvians are given access and resources for professional development training, they will drive new initiatives to achieve the SDG’s in Peru.

Instituto Perucano Sustainable Development Goals training with youth members (Selfie – July 2019 – Iquitos, Peru)

What motivates you to do the work that you do?

Since I was 15 years old, I realized quickly that the educational system was designed for some people to succeed over others. This success wasn’t based on intelligence, rather on resources provided by your family and network to move towards professional goals.

Fundamentally, I believe that the best people aren’t always the one leading, rather the ones that have leveraged social capital and accumulation of wealth. As a disruptor of local and global systems, I will continue to maintain a high level of equity and inclusion in every space I encounter. Therefore, motivation is sustained and driven to continuously be a better version of myself every day.

How did you find out about the UnSchool, and what motivated you to come?

While on sabbatical from seven years of disruptive work at the Kapor Center for Social Impact - SMASH in Brazil, I stayed at the Yunus Negócios Sociais Brasil in Sao Paulo. During my time at the center, my friend mentioned that he had recently completed a program in Sao Paulo, Brazil with the UnSchool. There was an opening that he encouraged me to apply after I quit my job to focus on starting Instituto Perucano.

I was ready for a change in my life, and I had no idea at the time how important it was to embrace the disruption that the UnSchool was destined to provide. I was motivated by my friend's recommendation from my time in Brazil. After pouring my heart out to him about my future aspirations and work, he strongly encouraged me to apply for an UnSchool opening in my home city of San Francisco, California. I applied, was accepted, and the rest is history!

What was your experience at the UnSchool like?

The experiential educational model UnSchool employs is uncommon and something that I am familiar with from some of my studies in higher education. From ages 18 – 24, I traveled in Latin America and East Africa through the Friends World Program (now called the Global College of Long Island University), a bachelor’s level college degree program.

During my studies in Honduras, Costa Rica, Kenya and Tanzania, I participated in experiential based learning that required the development of many of the disruptive design tools presented during our intensive in San Francisco, USA. The difference is that when I was younger, I didn’t have many tools to facilitate my experiential education.

UnSchool was the clarity I have been waiting for in my life that gave permission to be the leader I have always desired from others. The tools that UnSchool provided in combination with the facilitation methodology allowed me to embrace the learning community. As a leader, Leyla and her team of mentors made it easy to trust the process.

James and other team members (from left to right: Susanne, Aleesha, Drew) in deep discussion during the SF Fellowship (photo courtesy of the UnSchool blog).

What was the main take away you had from coming to the UnSchool?

Like any true learning experiences, many answers of the learning and knowledge we seek are right in front of us, within us. At times, I can be blinded by my own insecurities, doubts and limitations educational systems and society conditioned me to believe.

Once I was able to adjust my perspective, true learning experiences and processing of life experiences began to unfold. UnSchool helped me own my experiences and provided a platform and framework for me to continue building out Instituto Perucano in Latin America & the Caribbean.

Tell us more about your initiative(s), and how is it all going?

In 2019, Instituto Perucano received our first grant from the United States Embassy in Lima, Peru to support training in Sustainable Food Systems. The grant covered all expenses necessary for candidates to apply and participate in the 6 to 12-month programs. The grant is powered by Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture, and funded by the US Embassy in Lima, Peru.

Due to COVID-19, we employed a disruptive design approach to redesign the grant since global borders were closed.  We successfully redeployed funds and instead of only engaging 5 students for a grant to training in sustainable farming in the US, we are hosting 38 Perucano Fellows in Applied Agroecology in a virtual program in Peru. 

Another initiative is a partnership we have with the Nika Project, based in California, United States. Their mission is to support training in augmentative alternative communication for students with different learning abilities.  Volunteer teachers and speech pathologists spend their summer vacations traveling globally to lead, design and training teachers to create high-tech and low-tech learning environments for low-income students. 

In the summer 2021, Instituto Perucano will host Nika Project volunteers (teachers, speech pathologists, and students from San Francisco State University, USA) for an expanded training throughout Peru in Iquitos, Lima and Cuzco.  

Cindy Evans (Nika Project), Cathy Reategui (School Director, CEBE Iquitos). Photo Credit: James Sarria (selfie) - Location: Belem, Iquitos, Peru July 2019

Instituto Perucano has funded international travel to conferences and professional development training in human rights, education, agriculture and human health for Peruvians that have never traveled outside of the country.  The most recent included three lawyers that were funded to participate in the Sistema B conference in Latin America, which included a meeting of a coalition for environmental lawyers. These types of training have inspired other professionals in Iquitos to solicit impact funding for community impact projects.  

One current program initiative that stemmed from our work with the Nika Project at special needs schools is focused on creating a community education garden for students to learn about their food systems through hands-on workshops. 

There are over 30 special needs schools that we are developing plans to support. Our first planting took place at CEBE Iquitos right before a national quarantine in Peru, and since students couldn’t attend school, the plants were distributed directly to families for students to grow in their own homes.

Cathy Reategui Olortegui (CEBE Iquitos Director - front left) and Veruska Veintemilla (Instituto Perucano Regional Coordinator - front right) distributing sweet pepper plants in Iquitos, Loreto PERU July 2020

How did the UnSchool help you start/evolve it?

The UnSchool brought me to a point in my life to evaluate my life trajectory. In order to accomplish my professional and personal goals, I needed to reorient my life path to be inline with my main goal, which is to hold space for individuals that lack opportunity but not ambition.

We create learning opportunities for individuals to develop professionally in order to realize their ambitions. Before I would fully participate, I had to experience this social change first hand. The UnSchool has played a fundamental shift in my ability to materialize my goals.

How have you amplified this change you do in the world?

I amplify change by sharing my truth with others and holding space where anyone can do the same. This is the evolving work of the Instituto Perucano.  Having a physical, proprietary space is one of our goals. Place has an important role in society. Work in progress.

How can people engage with, support, or follow your work?

The best way is to follow our work on Facebook and Instagram. Our updated website is now live as of April 2020! Instagram – Facebook – Website

Any other thoughts you want to share?

I’m inspired by UnSchool’s founder, Leyla Acaroglu and her farm in Portugal.  My sister is the first person in my immediate family to own land and a house.  Growing up in public subsidized housing in the United States has shaped how I walk through the world. 

I long for a place to call my own, to be able to hold space without having to rent or while appreciated, rely on the good will of friends and family. My work is very personal, but I hope to be able to accumulate property and land someday to use communally for anyone that doesn’t feel they belong. 

Once someone feels like they are allowed to be themselves and given a place to heal and rest, it’s amazing to watch the power they self-generate. I strive to be able to articulate my perspective and theory of change like Leyla. Watch out for me ☺

Urban Farm project with Young Community Developer at San Francisco County Jail (Selfie – July 2018) - San Francisco, California USA

Free Sustainable Design and Circular Economy Toolkits

By Leyla Acaroglu

Over the years, my team and I have created a range of free, open-access toolkits to support change-makers in adopting the skills needed to help transform the global economy into a circular and sustainable one by design. 

Here I have assembled some of my favorite ones and a list of what we have created for anyone wanting to get started on activating change for free!

Through my design agency, Disrupt Design, my small team and I take commissions to make tools and self-initiate our own designs to help make change, wherever we can we get our clients and collaborators to allow for 20–100% of the content to be free and open access. We ourselves are committed to having a minimum 20% of our content open-source and free for all. 

Many of these toolkits would not have been made possible without the financial support of forward-thinking companies and organizations who see the value in creating beautiful and accessible content. So thanks! And if you are one of them, reach out to see what great things we can create together! 

The Circular Classroom 

We collaborated with the Walki Group, Co-Founders and the Finnish Education System to develop engaging and practical in-class resources on the circular economy, sustainability and creativity.

The Circular Classroom is a free, trilingual (English, Finnish + Swedish) educational resource for students and teachers alike. It is designed to integrate circular thinking into high school classrooms, all packaged up in a fun, beautiful format of video and workbooks.

The intention behind the project is to support young people in recognizing the exciting opportunity that redesigning products, services and systems have for the future, for exploring how their engagement with the world today impacts the future, and for supporting their decisions around future professions.

This commissioned project is designed to activate the circular economy in Scandinavia. The 3-part circular education program for high school students is available for free online in English, Finnish and Swedish. It is designed to be integrated into the Finnish high school curriculum, and is applicable globally.

The interactive video series and workbook toolkits includes an Educators’ ‘How To’ manual, as through our discovery workshops, we learned that students were very interested in this information, but the teachers felt they didn’t have the knowledge base to deliver it. This program is designed for co-learning between students and educators and includes 15 interactive educational activities.

www.circularclassroom.com

Circular Redesign Workshop Toolkit 

The Circular Economy Workshop Redesign Toolkit was inspired by years of running workshops with companies and organizations that want to embrace sustainable design, life cycle thinking and the circular economy.

We developed this over time when needing our own workshop facilitation tools, and then decided to put it together with instructions and make it open source so others can facilitate their own! 

Download the full toolkit here >

The Anatomy of Action 

A collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program, this project’s ambitious goal was to make sustainable living irresistible. To do this, we identified academically-validated lifestyle actions that will make a measurable change when amplified across communities. 

A year-long research study we conducted resulted in 5 key areas of impact and recommendations, which we turned into a momentum-building mixed media campaign called the Anatomy of Action.

This open-source project includes three videos, a downloadable toolkit to custom adapt to the local context, 350+ social shareable hand-drawn graphics, a 150-page data validation report, and a custom website. Within 15 days of the launch (still ongoing), there were 19k views, 3,500 toolkit downloads and 100+ countries who engaged, translating the graphics and data into multiple languages.

anatomyofaction.org

Post Disposable Activation Kit 

Your everyday actions can help to seed a movement that will dramatically and quickly reduce the massive environmental and social burdens that disposability has led us to, and help activate a global shift to a future that has positive outcomes for the entire planet. 

This requires all of us to embrace #POSTDISPOSABLE change! We have created a set of free tools to help you activate your leadership and make lifestyle shifts for a post disposable future! Become a citizen designer and help activate positive change now. Available in Spanish, Hindi & English. 

Check out the toolkit here > 

Superpower Activation Kit 

When I was named Champion of the Earth by the UN in 2016, we were inspired to create a toolkit of the everyday actions we can all take to activate our agency for a sustainable and just planet. That's how the Superpower Activation Kit was born! 

We put together this toolkit of everyday superpowers so every active citizen of the world who wants to participate with more purpose in the construction of the systems around them can do so. The 12 powers are based on a wealth of scientific data in our Disruptive Design Method, and the toolkit provides practical advice on how to activate them.

Download the toolkit here > 

Change Makers Lab Card Game 

As part of our 20% open source content policy, we have designed a fun hands-on toolkit that shares a series of activities designed for the Change Makers Lab created for SEAC Thailand. 

In this pack you get a full card game pack in Thai and English as a series of over 21 games to play with them focused on sustainability, systems thinking, active citizenship and making change.

Download the toolkit here >

Disruptive Design Workshop Facilitation Kit 

Expanding upon our skillset in experiential education and transformative change, we created this 65-page digital toolkit for Oxfam Asia. The guide was designed after a two-day Disrupt Design Activating Equity and Digital Activism workshop in Bangkok with Oxfam, along with 40 invited creative and media partners.

The goal was to create a step by step guide they could use within Oxfam to run workshops that help them design more effective campaigns to move people from knowledge to action. Chapters cover everything from ethical research to stakeholder engagement, systems mapping and creative communication decisions.

Download the toolkit here >

QUICK LINKS TO CONTENT

Circular Classroom (Finnish collab)
Anatomy of Action (UN collab)
UnSchool Open Source Kits & Classes
Disrupt Design Medium
UnSchool Journal
Fellowship Journals

Intro to the Disruptive Design Method
The ChangeMakers Lab Gard Game Kit
The Circular Classroom
The Post Disposable Activation Kit
Circular Economy ReDesign Workshop Kit
Superpower Activation Kit

Quick Guide to the Disruptive Design Method

By Leyla Acaroglu, Originally published on Medium

The Disruptive Design Method (DDM) is a systems-based approach to creative problem solving for tackling complex social and environmental issues. It combines sociological inquiry methods (mining) with systems explorations (landscaping) and design and creativity (building) approaches. The method is built on systems, sustainability and design, allowing for a three-dimensional perspective shift of a problem arena to ensure that interventions create positive change. Here we cover a quick guide to the DDM. 

We live in a complex interconnected world riddled with dynamic and often chaotic problems that requires a mindset and skillset shift in order for us to address them at a systemic level. 

The Disruptive Design Method is an approach to problem-solving that helps develop a three-dimensional perspective of the way the world works, and provides a unique way of exploring, identifying, and creating tactical interventions that leverage systems change for positive social and environmental outcomes.

The three-phase process of Mining, Landscaping, and Building (MLB) is cycled through to create outcomes that are creative and sustainability-focused. This approach offers a micro-to-macro-and-back-again perspective of the problem arena in which you wish to create positive change within and supports the development of a more three-dimensional worldview. 

The three phases of the Disruptive Design Method: Mining, Landscaping and Building

In this quick guide, I explain the what, why, and how of the DDM, along with ways it can help create non-conventional approaches to addressing complex problems, such as those presented by the UN Sustainable Development Goals. 

We use systems boundaries to define the spaces we wish to explore, and then find connection points perfect for a tactical intervene (which is often not where you would intuitively think, based on your starting knowledge in the problems arena). Then, because we have all this new knowledge from mining and landscaping, we can rapidly develop divergent and creative approaches to intervening in the systems the create change.

Any problem from small, hyper-local concerns to massive global issues can be explored and evolved through this method, and because it’s a thinking and doing practice, it can be adapted and evolved based on the problem. The core of the approach is always systems, sustainability, and design.

POSITIVELY DISRUPTIVE BY DESIGN 

Design is an incredibly powerful tool that changes the world. Everything around us has been constructed to meet the needs of our advanced human society, and in turn, our individual experiences of the world are influenced dramatically by the designed world we inhabit. 

We are each citizen designers of the future through the actions we take every day, which is why I developed the DDM as a systems-based creative intervention design method for exploring and actively participating in the design of a future that works better for us all. 

Intended as a way for creatives and non-creatives alike to develop the mental tools needed to activate positive change, the DDM approaches creative problem solving by mining through problems and employing a divergent array of research approaches, moving through to landscaping the systems at play and identifying the connections and relationship dynamics that reinforce the elements of the system, and then ideating opportunities for systems interventions that amplify positive impact by building new ideas that shift the status quo of the problem at a systems level. This is then cycled through in an iterative way until the outcome is tangible and effective at altering the state of the issue at hand. 

The DDM is an iterative process

As Buckminster Fuller teaches, often the smallest part of the system has the capacity to make the biggest change — and that’s one of the fundamental approaches that the DDM enables: identify the part within the system that you have agency and ability to impact.

Instead of avoiding or ignoring problems, we teach you how to be problem lovers who dive right into the sticky center of the issue; then, you will get busy designing divergent solutions that build on your unique individual sphere of influence, which is the space we can all curate to affect change on the people or things around us. Your personal sphere of influence will grow and ebb and flow over time.

Additionally, the DDM includes a 12-part knowledge set that, when explored as a whole, equips anyone with the thinking and doing tools to be a more aware and intentional agent for positive change. It also has the tools to cycle through the issues and seek out the non-obvious opportunities, designing divergent interventions and solutions that build on your unique individual sphere of influence. These are topics of self-development explored in my latest handbook Design Systems Change and through my 30-day Challenge. 

Perhaps most importantly though, instead of avoiding or ignoring problems, this method offers up tools for shifting perspectives that enable one to become a problem lover with the ability to dive right under the obvious parts of the issue at hand, avoid laying blame, and instead, identify and uncover the parts of the system that reinforce the issue so that change can be created. 

In a world where many people see and feel problematic impacts with intensity — the social, environmental, and political issues especially — and then become overwhelmed or disabled by this complexity, we see good-intentioned people disengage from taking action. Thus, I can not understate how powerful seeing problems through the lens of opportunity, optimism, and yes, even a bit of love can be for someone. I want to provide an agentizing effect, a set of tools that enable people to move from overwhelming problems to possible actions; after all, the world is made up of the accumulation of individual actions of many, you and me included.

Problem loving is the DDM mindset

THE ORIGINS OF THE DDM

When I first started to develop the Disruptive Design Method, it was in part a reaction to the one-dimensional problem-solving techniques that I had been taught through my years of traditional education. Back in 2014, as I was finishing my PhD and preparing to launch the UnSchool of Disruptive Design, I knew that there needed to be a scaffolding that would support all the content I wanted to fill this experimental knowledge lab with. Drawing on the years of professional experience and research I had to date, I went about iteratively developing and refining the modules from 20+ down to 12 core components of the Disruptive Design Methodology set, a learning system that, once fully engaged with, fits together to create the DDM.

The 12 core modules of the Disruptive Design Methodology

It’s a ‘scaffolding’ because it’s not intended to be rigid and formulaic, but instead, it offers the support that one needs as they start to develop a more three-dimensional view of the world and adopt the skills of systems thinking, problem exploration, and creative intervention design. I personally use this approach in all the commissions and collaborations I do, like in designing learning systems for Finland and Thailand, and in creating sustainable living initiatives, like the Anatomy of Action with the UNEP.

A scaffolding is often used to create support around a building as it is going up — it’s the skeleton structure that enables the progression up into the air. This is the intention with the DDM, to offer support as a 3D worldview and mindset is developed to overcome reductive thinking and create a more robust set of tools that enable a problem-loving approach to solving complex real-world problems. 

I, along with my team, have taught the DDM and the core approaches of systems and life cycle thinking to thousands of people all over the world, from teenagers to CEOs, with hundreds of alumni completing our in-person programs and thousands enrolled in our online school. We have seen many different incarnations of the DDM and its tools in action throughout our five years of running the UnSchool and its various programs. 

The world needs more pioneers of positively disruptive change — people equipped with the thinking and doing skills that will enable them to understand and love complex systems and then be able to translate that into actual change. There are, of course, many tools and approaches for designing change, and the DDM is just one of a wide suite of tools out there. I am an appreciator of many of them, but for me, the reason why anyone should gain an overview of this approach is that it combines the three pillars of systems, sustainability, and design, of which I have not seen an approach yet to do the same. 

What this all boils down to is having a unique method on hand to positively intervene and disrupt the status quo of any problem arena to ensure that the outcome is more effective, equitable, circular and sustainable. That’s why we always offer equity access scholarships and ensure that people from all walks of life can gain access to these valuable perspective-shifting tools we offer at the UnSchool.

THE 3-PARTS OF DISRUPTIVE DESIGN METHOD

There are three distinct parts of the Disruptive Design Method — Mining, Landscaping, and Building (MLB) — each is enacted and cycled through in order to gain a granulated, refined outcome through iterative feedback loops.

The first part is Mining, where the mindset is one of curiosity and exploration. In this phase, we do deep participatory research, suspend the need to solve, avoid trying to impose order, and embrace the chaos of any complex system we are seeking to understand. The tools of this phase are: research, observation, exploration, curiosity, wonderment, participatory action, questioning, data collection, and insights. This can be described as diving under the iceberg and observing the divergent parts that enable us to understand a problem arena in more detail.

The second stage is Landscaping. This is where we take all the parts that we uncovered during the Mining phase and start to piece them together to form a landscaped view through systems mapping and exploration. Landscaping is the mindset of connection, where you see the world as a giant jigsaw puzzle that you are putting back together and creating a different perspective that enables a bird’s eye view of the problem arena. Insights are gathered, and locations of where to intervene in the system to leverage change are identified. The tools for this phase are: systems mapping (cluster, interconnected circles, etc.), dynamic systems exploration, synthesis, emergence, identification, insight gathering, and intervention identification.

The third part of is Building. This is the creative ideation phase that allows for the development of divergent design ideas that build on potential intervention points to leverage change within the system. The goal is not to solve but to evolve the problem arena you are working within so that the status quo is shifted. Here we use a diversity of ideation and prototyping tools to move through a design process to get to the best-fit outcome for your intervention.

The key to this entire approach is iteration and ‘cycling through’ the stages to get to a refined and ‘best-fit’ outcome. Why do we do this? Because problems are complex, knowledge builds over time, and experience gives us the tools to make change that sticks and grows. This cycling through approach draws upon the Action Research Cycle to create an iterative approach to exploring, understanding, and evolving the problem arena.

The three applied parts of the MLB Method are based on a more complex Methodology set. This set combines 12 divergent theory arenas to form the foundation of identifying, solving, and evolving complex problems, as well as helps develop a three-dimensional perspective of the way the world works. From cognitive sciences to gamification and systems interventions, the 12 units of the Disruptive Design Methodology are designed to fit together to form the foundations of a practice in creative change-making.

THE FOUNDATIONS: SYSTEMS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND DESIGN

The UnSchool is deeply rooted in a foundation of applied systems, sustainability, and design, forming three knowledge pillars that hold up all we do — including leveraging the Disruptive Design Method. 

The three pillars of the UnSchool and DDM

Whenever we teach a program, we always begin with systems thinking as the foundation, as it is one of the most powerful tools that we can use to address complex problems. It enables any practitioner to see how everything is interconnected, and systems can be viewed from multiple perspectives, allowing a shift from rigid to flexible mindsets. We also engage with the principles of sustainability through each phase, which for us, means doing more with less, understanding how the planet works so that we can work within its means, and evolving from an extraction-based society to a circular and regenerative one. 

Through the Mining phase, systems boundaries are used to define the problem arenas that one wants to explore. Through systems mapping, research techniques, observation and reflection, all the parts that make up a system and their connections are explored through the landscaping phase, laying the groundwork for exposing unique places to intervene (which is often not where you would intuitively think, based on your starting knowledge in the problem arena).

From this, new knowledge is built from the Mining and Landscaping phases, which forms the foundation for the Building phase — rapidly designing divergent and creative ideas to intervening in the problem arena. Any problem from small, hyper-local concerns to massive global issues can be explored and evolved through this MLB Method. And, because it’s equally a thinking and doing practice, it can be adapted and evolved based on any problem. The core of the approach is always systems, sustainability, and design. 

HOW THE DISRUPTIVE DESIGN METHOD HELPS MAKE POSITIVE CHANGE

LOVING THE PROBLEM

Many people avoid problems, which means that they never truly understand them. By learning to love problems and see them as opportunities in disguise, you will develop an open mind that thinks differently. This is all about being curious and trying to understand something before you attempt to solve it! The more curiosity you can foster, the more things you will uncover about the world around you.

SEEING RELATIONSHIPS

Everything is interconnected, and actions create reactions. Being able to see the relationships that make up cause and effect are part of any good problem solvers tool belt. The content of the DDM is designed to foster systems perspectives as well as deep identification with cause and effect relationships.

PERSPECTIVE SHIFTING

The ability to see the world through other people’s eyes is critical to building resilience, empathy, and leadership skills. You will uncover how to constantly reflect and explore the world from diverse perspectives, overcome biases and be able to put yourself in the shoes of others to understand why people think or behave differently to you based on their own life and learning experiences.

COLLABORATION

Respectfully and successfully working with others, despite differences, is critical to creativity and leadership skills. The goal is to encourage people to see that diversity in collaboration is just as important as agreement, and that coming to a consensus can be achieved in many different ways. Many of the tools we teach, such as systems mapping, can be used as brilliant collaboration tools, so you gain incredible opportunities to foster effective collaboration.

---

At the UnSchool, we approach making change as a state of being; we believe that being change-centric is a way of defining a life agenda, finding purpose, and setting the tone for how you live and contribute through your life and work. We all have the power to affect positive social and environmental change in and through everything we do, from the things we buy to the conversations we have and the kind of work we do. This change-centric approach is by all means a cultivated one in which you have to work at wanting to make change. Because truly, it’s not always easy; in fact, trying to make change can definitely hurt sometimes — and frankly, it often requires some measure of failure along the way. How would we have evolved as a species had we not experienced millions of years of failure and accidents? Allowing the space for failing early on creates better, stronger results later. In saying this, it should also be noted that change is one of the easiest things to make happen… if you have the right tools and resources, which are built into the DDM.

You can take the full program at your own pace via our online school here, or if you do a certification track, you get access to the full 12 modules, plus loads of extra content on activating and facilitating change. 

Quick Guide to Circular Economy Business Strategies

By Leyla Acaroglu, Originally published on Medium

The Circular Economy is all about the transformation of the way we do business, create goods and services, organize society and ultimately respect and cherish the world around us. Moving from a linear to a circular economy requires a reconfiguration of nearly all business structures, which is where circular business strategies come into play.

In my quick guide series, I am providing an overview of the different decision making support tools that enable the transformation to a circular and sustainable society. We are all consumers in the current linear economy, but as we transition to one that massively reduces waste and instead promotes a variety of reuse approaches, we will each become shareholders in the delivery and cycling of goods and services throughout the economy. This requires a redesign of nearly everything, and the sustainable design decisions I outlined already cross over with these sustainable business strategies as they interlock to provide a pathway form linear to circular. Like any strategy, there is no one size fits all solution and there are new ideas and approaches being designed and tested in more detail as we see the advancement of this transformation.

As individuals, as governments and as organizations, we already encourage or discourage industries, services and products based on what we invest in and thus support, in our time, energy and money. If you are someone who works for a company and makes decisions, then you definitely need to understand how the economy is currently transforming and what the new types of business models are evolving to service the in-demand need for a resource-efficient, equitable, sustainable and circular world.

As we enter into this new green recovery stage, there are many businesses in need of reconfiguration, pivots and performance changes, where the standard business models, policies, products, and services just don't fit any longer. In order to meet the growing demand for sustainable and circular products and the political shifts towards equitable industries, companies need to come to terms with these new approaches to making money whilst also making good.

“Circular business models modify the pattern of product and material flows through the economy.” — OECD Business Model for Circular Economy Report

Within a circular economy, goods cycle through two main types of metabolism flows. One is the technical system, which includes all the human-made, technically-altered goods, and these must be designed to be recaptured, reused, repaired, remanufactured and where appropriate recycled, in order to ensure material values are maximized and technical products don't escape into the natural environment — which leads us to the other main metabolism, the biological one. This encompasses all the goods and materials that are biologically based and can easily and benignly be metabolized back into nature. All food products, for example, are biological, while all food packaging that has any technical additions like plastic is in the technical stream.

Many of the ecological impacts, the externalities that we see in the economy, have come about as a result of supply chain relationships — not just the end-of- life destination where things end up. Yet, much of our investment and activation for change thus far has been around waste management, rather than on designing out waste from the system right from the start. In part, the circular economy is trying to address this by providing pathways for full systems redesign, rather than just end-of-life tweaks.

The global economy is designed around the consumption of goods and services, so much so that the measurement tool we use to determine the success of nations, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), only measures the things produced and sold in a country. It ignores the losses from the systems that it takes from, such as nature, ignores any activities that have no economic aspect to them and ultimately creates a very narrow view of value and wealth. GDP is a massive system failure as it externalizes all ecological impacts. This way of measuring the economy is only 70 years old, and it has helped to create many of the environmental issues that plague us today.

GDP is one of the driving forces that created the global linear economy, whereby every day millions of tons of raw materials are extracted from nature (through mining, harvesting, cropping, etc.); these are mechanically processed into usable goods in factories, shipped around the world, and then purchased, used up, and thrown out. When things are discarded, they often end up in landfills, incinerators or dumps, or worse they escape back into nature in harmful ways because they were only ever designed to maximize the benefits to the producers and not to consider the full life cycle impacts that they may have. Waste in all its forms is a byproduct of this linear system, whereas in nature, there is no such thing as waste; our species has created pollution of all sorts. This has created a huge strain on the waste and recycling systems, of which are currently broken, resulting in many ecological, equity and health implications, and created the demand for transforming the way we do business, meet human needs and structure the entire economy.

As we progress to the normalization and integration of the circular approaches, pioneering leadership is required from governments and CEOs, as well as the creative thinkers who can help shift the status quo through designing new things that make the old polluting, degrading, inequitable systems obsolete. We are starting to see this, with many of the world's biggest companies committing to adopting circularity, carbon reduction, and sustainable design strategies.

We can speed up the needed change by incentivizing producers to approach product and business design differently — to use sustainable design approaches and life cycle assessment to help green supply chains and find unique ways of shifting the status quo on hyper-consumerism through the implementation of closed-loop product delivery models.

“Circular business models are special in the sense that they look for value creation in places usually of little interest to companies that operate in the traditional linear production paradigm”. — Guldmann, Best Practice Examples of Circular Business Models

The future is circular, not just in the wider economy, but also in our daily lives. As we become more aware of the impact of our actions, we are more incentivized and agentized to make informed and effective decisions. We can no longer avoid the reality that our planet is in need of better care. The linear economy has helped us advance to this incredible point in time, but the advancement has come at major costs to the ecological systems that sustain life on Earth, which in turn affects our health and quality of life as we battle climate change, air pollution, global pandemics and loss of biodiversity. These issues are all interconnected, and until we change the way we do things, we will continue to be the victims of our own poor decisions.

The circular economy is seeking to remedy this through shifts in the way we arrange society, the way we produce goods and services, and the way we all consume, in order to ultimately design the kind of future we want to live in. One that is equitable, sustainable and regenerative by design.

Before we dive into the business models that are part of this transformation, let’s quickly cover some of the key concepts that are central to the circular shift.

Circular Economy Core Concepts

It's important to know that the movement for the transformation to a closed-loop circular economy has been well underway for several decades. Work at multiple levels of research, industry and government has been ongoing to advance the idea of product stewardship, cleaner production and extended producer responsibility. Here are the main overarching concepts that fit within the circular economy:

• Product Stewardship: The parent company of the design, production and sales takes full responsibility for reducing the environmental impact of the product they create throughout the entire life cycle of the product, ensuring that there are appropriate end-of-life options and that these are managed by the parent company.

• Extended Producer Responsibility: A policy approach whereby all of the full life-cycle environmental costs associated with a product are added to the final sale price, and this extra revenue is used to manage the product stewardship of the product.

• Eco Design: Approaches to designing products so that they last longer and have a limited impact on the environment across their full life cycle. This is also called sustainable design, and I have a quick guide to this here too.

• Cleaner Producer: A preventative measure by companies to reduce the waste and pollution associated with the production of goods.

• Industrial Ecology: Ways of remodelling industrial systems to perform more like ecological ones and maximize value exchange.

• Industrial Symbiosis: Part of industrial ecology, a network of diverse organizations collaborate to ensure that resources are used efficiently and value is cycled between them.

• Waste Equals Food: An approach where all ‘waste’ becomes a nutrient to something else in the system.

• Non-Fossil Energy: Energy derived from renewable resources.

• True-Cost Accounting: A type of accounting that takes into consideration the full externalities and costs associated with delving a service, doing business, or creating a product.

• Cradle to cradle: A concept of ensuring that the full life of a product is managed in a sustainable way that was made popular in a book of the same name and has a certification system for products.

• Biomimicry: An approach to creating products and services that mimic the way nature works by studying and replicating the solutions found in the natural world.

• Regenerative Design: A whole systems approach to creating solutions that offer back more than is taken in their creation by exploring the way natural systems solve problems and creating things that are interconnected with natural systems.

• Post Disposable: A movement to make waste obsolete by designing solutions that move beyond waste as a socially acceptable concept.

• Life Cycle Thinking: A framework that takes into consideration the whole of life environmental impacts of a product or service by looking at the impacts that actions in the economy have on natural systems by looking from the cradle to grave. I have a guide to this here.

• Disruptive Design: Disruptive Design is a way for creatives and non-creatives alike to develop the mental tools to activate positive change by mining through problems, employing a divergent array of research approaches, moving through systems thinking, and then ideating opportunities for systems interventions that amplify positive impact.

• Systems Thinking: Systems thinking is a holistic approach to understanding the way parts fit together in dynamic relationships to make up a whole system. It’s the opposite of reductive or linear thinking and involves a series of practical approaches and mental models that enable a more complex view of the world, focusing on relationships and synthesis.

• Closing the loop: This Is a concept promoted by some businesses as a solution to waste generation and in support of the circular economy. By closing the loop on the end-of-life impacts of a product from the design stage, the business can be redesigned to support end- to-end integrated systems.

• Technical nutrients: Materials or stocks that are manipulated by humans and cannot be easily re-integrated into nature (for example, plastics).

• Biological nutrients: Materials or stocks that can be easily absorbed or digested by natural systems in a benign way (unbleached paper or food).

• Metabolism rate: The ability for things to be reabsorbed or integrated into a system — food waste, for example, can be easily metabolized in a compost bin or biodigester, whereas it does not get effectively metabolized in a landfill.

• Zero waste: This is a strategy and movement to go beyond waste reduction and remove all disposable products from a place, company or lifestyle by embracing a set of strategies that eliminate waste completely. The goal is to avoid sending any waste to a landfill or incinerator.

(There are many more! I have a class that covers all of this in way more detail coming out soon, and we also have a gamified toolkit that asks these questions and helps you get to a sustainable outcome — see here)

Circular Economy Business Models

The types of business model transformations that are underway and will become more prevalent in the near future include different approaches to closing the loop so that end-to-end material flows are managed by the producers. The burden of waste is not transferred to the end-user, but instead, the company has stewardship over their products for its full life cycle and designs products to be recaptured to ensure that the values of the materials and embodied impacts are maximized.

Every industry and product category will need a different combination of business and design approaches, as some materials are easily re-metabolized and some aren't, some product categories are much simpler than others, etc. The fundamental shift here is how we design goods to flow through the economy and the responsibility that producers take of their goods, enabling customers to return, reuse, or repair to ensure that value is continually increased.

REPAIR

Designing products to have extended life spans by providing repair services and maximizing likelihood of repair during use and end of life phases.

REMANUFACTURE

Creating within a closed-loop system where products are intentionally intended to be taken back, reconditioned or fed back into the production cycle to create new high value products.

RESELL

The resale or buyback of products are encouraged, supporting the continuation of the functionality and increasing the usable life span.

SHARING PLATFORMS

The creation of service provisions within a product context to maximize the reuse and shareability of the goods.

WASTE AS A RESOURCE

Products are designed to intentionally use others’ byproducts or to ensure that their own byproducts are absorbed into a new system.

PRODUCT AS SERVICE MODEL

Products are reimagined into service delivery models, and long-term relationships are built with the customers. Products are always owned by the producer and leased to the customer thus they can be made of higher value and managed across their entire life.

CIRCULAR SUPPLIES

Products are part of the supply model, and consumers collaborate to share resources and ensure that circular products are available on the market.

RESOURCE RECOVERY

Mining landfills or extracting materials back from the economy to ensure that they are circulated back into the system. This could be a third party provided system.

PRODUCT LIFE EXTENSION

Challenging the traditional model of lots of customers buying individual units by offering higher value longer-term products and ensuring they are utilized. Perhaps with a pay per use model of another way of ensuring that materials stay in the economy longer.

But wait, there are more strategies!

There are actually many more considerations and opportunities that apply to different stages, product categories and the level of change you are at. I have created a free toolkit for circular redesign to walk you through a quick creative process.

If you want to learn more about this, we have an introductory class on the circular economy, many resources and several handbooks on Circular Systems Design that dive into this in more detail. I also host a group on LinkedIn for people working in systems change. Additionally, we are launching an extensive set of programs and services for businesses interested in advancing their skills in this arena as part of a new set of programs and masterclasses designed for business transformation.

A Quick Guide to Sustainable Design Strategies

By Leyla Acaroglu, Originally published on Medium

Sustainable design is the approach to creating products and services that have considered the environmental, social, and economic impacts from the initial phase through to the end of life. EcoDesign is a core tool in the matrix of approaches that enables the Circular Economy.

There is a well-quoted statistic that says around 80% of the ecological impacts of a product are locked in at the design phase. If you look at the full life cycle of a product and the potential impacts it may have, be it in the manufacturing or at the end of life stage, the impacts are inadvertently decided and thus embedded in the product by the designers, at the design decision-making stage.

This makes some uncomfortable, but design and product development teams are responsible for the decisions that they make when contemplating, prototyping, and ultimately producing a product into existence. And thus, they are implicated in the environmental and social impacts that their creations have on the world. The design stage is a perfect and necessary opportunity to find unique and creative ways to get sustainable and circular goods and services out into the economy to replace the polluting and disposable ones that flood the market today. The challenge is which designers will pick up the call to action and start to change the status quo of an industry addicted to mass-produced, fast-moving, disposable goods?

For those that are ready to make positive change and be apart of the transition to a circular and sustainable economy by design, the good news is there is a well-established range of tools and techniques that a designer or product development decision-maker can employ to ensure that a created product is meeting its functional and market needs in ways that dramatically reduce negative impacts on people and the planet. These are known as ecodesign or sustainable design strategies, and whilst they have been around for a while, the demand for such considerations is even more prominent as the movement toward a sustainable, circular economy increases.

Sustainability, at its core, is simply about making sure that what we use and how we use it today, doesn’t have negative impacts on current and future generations' ability to live prosperously on this planet. Its also about ensuring we are meeting our needs in socially just, environmentally positive and economically viable ways, so its very much a design challenge. Consumption is a major driver of unsustainability, and all consumer goods are designed in some way.

When sustainability is applied to design, it enlightens us to the impacts that the product will have across its full life cycle, enabling the creator to ensure that all efforts have been made to produce a product that fits within the system it will exist within in a sustainable way, that it offers a higher value than what was lost in its making, and that it does not intentionally break or be designed to be discarded when it is no longer useful. Provisions should have been made so that there are options for how to maximize its value across its full life cycle and keep materiality in a value flow. This is otherwise known now as the circular economy and the practice of enabling this is circular systems design.

Long before there was a Twitter hashtag devoted to all things sustainability, sustainable design pioneers like Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek were figuring out how to reduce the impact of produced goods and services through design. As the sustainability concept has evolved, so has the framework for the thinking and doing tools that we now can routinely integrate into our practices to help understand and design out impacts and design in higher value. I see sustainable design as one of the tools that we each need to employ in order to make things better, its the practical side of considering sustainability, connected to considerations around life cycle thinking, systems thinking, circular thinking and regenerative design. By understanding these approaches, a toolbox for change can be created by any practitioner to advance their ability to create incredible things that offer back more than they take. This should be the goal of any creative development.

The ecodesign strategy set for sustainable design includes techniques like Design for Disassembly, Design for Longevity, Design for Reusability, Design for Dematerialization, and Design for Modularity, among many other approaches that we will run through in this quick guide. Basically, the ecodesign strategy toolset helps us think through the way something will exist and how to design for value increases whilst also maintaining functionality, aesthetics, and practicality of products, systems, and services. It’s especially effective when applying materiality to any of the creative interventions you are pursuing in your changemaking practice, be it a designer or not. We have a free toolkit for redesigning products to be circular that also details all of these strategies, and more.

For decades, much progressive experimentation and exploration of ecodesign, cleaner production, industrial ecology, product stewardship, life cycle thinking, and sustainable production and consumption has occurred, which all led up to the current framing of a new approach to humans meeting their needs in ways that don’t destroy the systems needed to sustain us. Right now the framing is around creating a sustainable, regenerative, and circular economy, whereby the things we create to meet our needs are designed to fit with the systems of the planet and maintain materials in benign or beneficial flows within the economy, which requires businesses to change the way they deliver value and consumers to adjust their expectations around hyper-consumerism. Central to this success is the design of goods and services and that's where these strategies and designers' creativity fit in.

There have been thousands of academic articles and business case studies on a multitude of different approaches to sustainable and ethical business practices, demonstrating the strong and clear need for systems-level change. Contributions from biomimicry, cradle to cradle, product service systems (PSS) models, eco-design strategies, life cycle assessment, eco-efficiency and the waste hierarchy all fit together to support this approach to sustainable design.

The Circular Economy

Within the last 20 or so years, we have really started to feel the negative impacts of what's called the linear economy, where raw materials are extracted from nature, turned into usable goods, purchased and then quickly discarded usually due to poor design choices, inferior materials or trend changes (or the more insidious practice of planned obsolescence). Recently, there has been a great framing around the shift from linear to circular systems called The Circular Economy Framework, which combines a range of pre-existing theories and approaches. Moving to a circular economy (which embraces closed-loop and sustainable production systems) means that the end of life of products is considered at the start, and the entire life cycle impacts are designed to offer new opportunities, not wasteful outcomes.

Our interpretation of the value flows within the circular economy from the Circular Systems Design handbook.

You may be wondering — especially if you aren’t a designer — how can we integrate this into a creative practice to make a positive change? Well, here’s the thing, the approaches to understanding and reducing the impacts of material processes are really important to reduce the use of global materials and the ecological impacts of our production and consumption choices. This is what the circular economy movement is seeking to achieve: a transformation in the way we meet our material needs.

On top of that, these approaches are very empowering for non-material decisions — you start to see the ways in which the world works and can apply this thinking to different problem sets. Sustainable design and production techniques allow for reducing the material impact by maximizing systems in service design — thus, providing sustainability during both production and consumption.

From our free educational project, The Circular Classroom. Find out more here

EcoDesign Strategies

These sustainable design strategies are best known as starting off with Victor Papanek in the 1970’s and have been contributed to over the years by many different people and approaches. This curated life of ‘design for x’ strategies takes into consideration the circular economy and how they relate to closing the loop and dramatically changing economic models.

In this list I have curated, I have also included a few “negative” design approaches at the end to remind you what not to do, and how easy it is to accidentally do the wrong thing right, rather than the right thing a little bit wrong.

In order to achieve circular and sustainable design, some, or many, of these design considerations need to be employed in combination throughout the design process in order to ensure that the outcome is not just a reinterpretation of the status quo, but something that actually challenges and changes the way we meet our needs.

These approaches are lenses you apply to the creative process in order to challenge and allow for the emergence of new ways to deliver functionality and value within the economy. There are also separate considerations of the circularization process outlined in the next section.

Product Service Systems (PSS) Models

One of the main ideas of the circular economy is moving from single-use products to products that fit within a beautifully designed and integrated closed-loop system which is enabled through this approach. Think of alternatives to purchasable products such as leasable items that exist as part of a company-owned system or services that enable reuse. Leasing a product out — rather than selling it directly — allows the company to manage the product across its entire life cycle, so it can be designed to easily fit back into a pre-designed recycling or re-manufacturer system, all whilst reducing waste.

By transitioning away from single end-consumer product design to these PSS models, the relationship shifts and the responsibility for the packaging and product itself is shared between the producer and the consumer. This incentivizes each agent to maintain the value of the product and to design it so that it’s long-lasting and durable. PSS requires the conceptualization of meeting functional needs within a closed system that the producer manages in order to minimize waste and maximize value gains after each cycling of the product. Many of the circular economy business models are either based on this concept or create services that enable the ownership of the product to be maintained by the company and leased to the customer. But it’s critical that this is done within a strong ethical framework and not used to manipulate or coerce people, as this could also easily be the outcome of a more explorative version of this design approach.

Product Stewardship

In a traditional linear system, producers of goods are not required to take responsibility of their products or packaging once they have sold the product into the market. Some companies offer limited warranties to guarantee a certain term of service, but many producers avoid being involved in the full life of what they create. This means that there are limited incentives for them to design products with closed-loop end of life options. In a circular economy, producers actively take responsibility for the full life of the things they create starting from the business model through to the design and end of life management of their products.

Product stewardship and extended producer responsibility are two strong initiatives that encourage companies to be more involved in the full life of what they produce in the world. There are several ways that this can occur; in a voluntary scenario, companies work to circularize their business models (such as a PSS model) or governments issue policies that require companies to take back, recapture, recycle or re-manufacture their products at the end of their usable life. For example, the European Union has many product stewardship policies in place to incentivize better product design and full life management such as the Ecodesign directive, WEEE, Product Stewardship and now the circular economy directives.

The key here is that the design of both the products and the business case is created to have full life-cycle responsibility and is managed as an integrated approach to product service delivery so that the product doesn't get lost from the value system. Partnerships between organizations can enable a rapid introduction of product stewardship, such as a bottling company leasing the service of beverage containers to the drinks company. One key element of this is a take-back program, whereby the producing company offers to take back and reconfigure, repair, remanufacture or recycling the products they produced. This incentivizes them to design them to be easily fixed, upgraded or pulled apart for high-value material recycling.

Dematerialization

Reducing the overall size, weight and number of materials incorporated into a design is a simple way of keeping down the environmental impact. As a general rule, more materials result in greater impacts, so it’s important to use fewer types of materials and reduce the overall weight of the ones that you do use without compromising on the quality of the product.

You don’t want to dematerialize to the point where the life of the product is reduced or the value is perceived as being less; you want to find the balance between functional service delivery, longevity, value and optimal material use.

Modularity

Products that can be reconfigured in different ways to adapt to different spaces and uses have an increased ability to function well. Modularity can increase resale value and offer multiple options in one material form. Just like you can build anything with little Lego blocks, modularity as a sustainable design approach implicates the end owner in the design so they can reconfigure the product to fit their changing life needs.

As a design approach for non-physical outcomes, modularity enables creatives to consider how the things they create can be used in different configurations. This is all about making this adaptable to different scenarios and thus increase value over time. It’s important to ensure designs are durable enough to withstand being taken apart and reconfigured, as well as making it easy to do and the style timeless so it increases its duration of use. Modularity should also increase recycling and repairability by offering replacement parts and a service model.

Longevity

Longevity is about creating products that are aesthetically timeless, highly durable and will retain their value over time so people can resell them or pass them on. Products that last longer aren’t replaced as frequently and can be repaired or upgraded during their life as long as their style and functionality have durability as well.

Ensure that the materials you select enable a long life, and be sure to consider multiple use case scenarios such as repair options and resale encouragement.

Disassembly

Design for disassembly requires a product to be designed so that it can be very easily taken apart for recycling at the end of its life. How it is put together, the types of materials that are used and the connection methods all need to be designed to increase the speed and ease of taking it apart for repair, remanufacturing and recycling. Often the case with technology, the norm is to design products that lock the end owner out, discouraging any form of repairability during the use phase while also reducing the likelihood of recapturing the materials at the end of life.

This design strategy is particularly relevant to technology, requiring the design of the sub and primary components to be just as easily disassembled as it is to manufacture them. For maximum recapture, we need to reduce the number of different types of materials, the connection mechanisms, and the ease of extraction. This is a super critical strategy for monitoring technical materials inflow to reduce negative impacts at end of life.

Recyclability

Making a recyclable product goes beyond simply selecting a material that can be so. You have to consider the recyclability of all the materials, the way they are put together and the use case, along with the ease of recycling at end of life. Relying on something being “technically recyclable” as a sustainable design solution to your product is just lazy and often does not result in environmental benefits, as recycling is very much broken. So, you need to ensure that it is being designed to maximize the likelihood that it will be recaptured and recycled in the system it will exist within.

Assembly methods will impact how easily disassembled for recycling products will be. Also, make sure that there are systems in place so that the product can actually be recycled in the location it will end up! For it to be circular, the product has to fit within a closed-loop system, and recycling often is the least beneficial outcome since we lose materials and increase waste through this system.

Connected to disassembly is the ability to easily and cost-effectively recapture the material at end of life. Just making something recyclable does not guarantee that it will be recycled, as it’s often costly and time-consuming. Additionally, many technology items are shredded to get the valuable parts (like gold) instead of getting all the different parts back. What is crucial about this strategy is that it must be used in a system that has the appropriate and functioning recycling market, or a take-back and recapture system must be in place, as well as design features that maximize the behavioral outcomes of the end owners so that the product is actually reacquired and recycled. The Scandinavian bottle recycling system is a perfect example of this. Drink bottles are made of thick and durable materials that can be washed and re-manufactured, and the system is set up with an easy-to-use deposit program and financial incentive to maintain a high level of recapture.

Repairability

Repair is a fundamental aspect of the circular economy. Things wear out, break, get damaged, and need to be designed to allow for easy repair, upgrading, and fixability. Along with the extra parts and instructions on how to do this, we need systems that support, rather than discourage, repair in society. For example, many Apple products are intentionally designed to be difficult to repair, with patented screws and legal implications for opening products up.

Sweden recently opened the world’s first department store dedicated to repair, but any product producer can put mechanisms into place for ease of repair so that the owner has more autonomy over the product and will be encouraged to do so. The Fair Phone is a great example of this.

Reusability

Repair allows the end owner to maintain its value over time, or sell it more easily to then increase its lifespan. But there is also the option of designing so that the product can be reused in a different way from its intended original purpose, without much extra material or energy inputs. An example of this is a condiment jar designed to be used as a water glass.

There are many ways a product can serve a second or even third life after its core original purpose. This approach is useful when you have limited options for designing out disposability.

Re-manufacture

For this strategy, the producer takes into consideration how the parts or entire product can be re-manufactured into new usable goods in a closed-loop system; it’s critical to the technology sector but fits perfectly for many products.

Re-manufacturing is when a product is not completely disassembled and recycled or reused, but instead, some parts are designed to be reused and other parts recycled, depending on what wears out and what maintains its usefulness over time.

Efficiency

During the use phase, many products require constant inputs, such as energy, in the form of charging or water in the form of washing. When a product requires lifetime inputs, it’s called an “active product”, meaning it is constantly tapping into other active systems in order to achieve its function. That’s when design for efficiency comes in, designing to dramatically reduce the input requirements of the product during its use phase.

This will increase the environmental performance and also reduce wear of the product, increasing lifetime use. This approach can also be taken as an overarching one — design to maximize the efficiency of materials, processes, and human labor. As a general rule, “Weight equals impact,” and the more efficient you can be with materials, the lower the overall impact per product unit (this rule has many exceptions, as it is always related to what the alternatives are).

Influence

Things we use influence our lives. This is why social media applications are designed to act like slot machines with continuous scroll, and why airport security lines make you feel like a farm animal. The things we design in turn design us, and thus there is a huge scope for creating products, services, and systems that influence society in more positive ways.

There is still a lot of resistance to sustainability, often because it seems confusing. So, imagine how you can design things that give people an alternative experience to this mainstream perspective. Designing in positive feedback loops to the owner helps change behaviors, just as designing in less options to limit confusion can help direct the more preferable use.

Equity

Accidentally or intentionally, many goods are designed to reinforce stereotypes. Pink toys for girls, dainty watches for women, and chunky glasses for men are a few examples. Reinforcing stereotypes subtly maintains negative and inequitable status quos in society. There are entire labs dedicated to first researching an established trend, and then designing to reinforce it. Design for equity requires the reflection and disruption of the mainstream references that reinforce inequitable access to resources, be it based on gender or outdated stereotypes.

Oppression and inequality exist everywhere, from toilet seat designs to office buildings. Considering the potential impact of your designs on all sorts of humans is critical to creating things that are ethical and equitable. This also applies to the supply chain, ensuring that people along the full chain of materials and manufacturing are valued, paid fairly and respected.

Systems Change

Perhaps the most important of the design strategy tools is the ability to design interventions that actively shift the status quo of an unsustainable or inequitable system. The world is made up of systems, and everything we do will have an impact in some way of the systems around us. So instead of seeing your product as an individual unit, see it as an animated agent in a system, interacting with other agents and thus having impacts.

All systems are dynamic, constantly changing and interconnected. Materials come from nature, and everything we produce will have to return in some way. So, designing from a systems perspective with the objective of intervening will allow for more positively disruptive outcomes to the status quo (see my handbook on the Disruptive Design Method for more on this approach).

Other things to consider

• Where is the energy being sourced? Shift from fossil to renewables.

• What are the hidden impacts embedded within the supply chain? Remove embodied fossil fuel energy.

• How can you recover and put to good use all wasted resources across the supply chain? Look for industrial symbiosis or by-product reuse opportunities.

• How can you design in life extension on your products? Design repair and rescue options as a service for your products.

• Are there ways of partnering to create industrial symbiosis where your product’s by-products are used as raw materials for another process? Reduce waste to landfill by encouraging secondary industries to use industrial by-products.

• How can you design your product to be a service instead? Embrace full product stewardship.

• Do you need to produce a product to deliver the functional need? Look for alternative business models to deliver your customer’s functional desires.

• What is the energy mix in the manufacturing and use phase? The types of energy used will increase or decrease environmental impacts.

• Does a product need to exist or can we deliver value and function in a different format?

The UnSustainable Design Approaches!

There are many insidious techniques used by designers to manipulate and coerce consumers into behaviors and practices that are unsustainable and inequitable. Here are three types you should avoid! There are also many accidental actions that may have good intentions that result in greenwashing, so be careful not to invest more in marketing green credentials than in R&D to ensure your product truly is what you claim it to be.

Design for Obsolescence

Planned obsolescence is one of the critically negative ramifications of the GDP-fueled hyper-consumer economy. This is where things are designed to intentionally break, or the customer is locked out through designs that limit repair or software upgrades that slow down processes. This approach tries to constantly turn a profit by manipulating a usable good so its functionality is restricted or reduced and the customer is forced to constantly purchase new goods. It’s in everything from toothbrushes to technology. The habit has led to massive growth, but at the expense of durability and sustainability. How it is used as a positive strategy is when it is part of a well-designed closed-loop system that enables the product to naturally “die” at the right time so it can be reintegrated into the system it is designed within.

Design for Disposability

Designing for things to break is due to the cultural normalization of disposability as a result of increased use of disposability in the design of everyday goods. From coffee cups to technological items, it is a race to the bottom of our economy, where many reusable things have become hyper-disposable. Single-use items plague our oceans with plastic waste and increase the end cost for small businesses and everyday people, as the more addictive the cycle of disposability is, the more costly it becomes to deliver basic service offerings. I have written extensively about this; read more here.

Dark Patterning

A term coined by designer Harry Brignull, the idea of dark patterns are intentional tricks used by designers to manipulate and lure customers into taking actions they don’t necessarily make the choice to do or may otherwise not agree to. Dark patterning includes often exploiting cognitive weaknesses and biases to get people to do things like purchasing extra items they did not need when checking out online, or creating a sense of urgency to increase purchasing — leveraging single-click buy now for impulse buys, using particular colors to evoke emotions and sharing outright misleading information to increase purchases. This website has many great examples.

---

LOOKING FOR MORE?

Much of this content is from my handbook on Circular Systems Design, and over at the UnSchool Online, I have a short course on sustainable design strategies and a more extensive one on sustainable design and production. You may also like to find out about the Disruptive Design Method that I created to support deeper design decisions that works to help solve complex problems. I also created the Design Play Cards which include all the eco-design strategies and fun challenges to solve.

Racial Equity Tools and Resources

Racism the world over is a designed system of oppression. The system we live within, the one that allows for humans of certain skin colors, religious identities or sexual orientations to be oppressed to the point of literal and figurative suffocation is by design.

The system is not ‘broken’ per se; it was designed to serve a purpose and it is achieving that end goal, that being an economic and cultural system based on exploitation and extraction that enables some to get rich and live particular lifestyles at the expense of others.

This is one of the fundamental issues with power: once you have it - given by birth or earned through merit - you will fight pretty hard to keep it, as the cognitive impact is one of being entitled to the privileges that having that power enables you to hold.

One of the first steps to change is understanding the origins of the problem, the role we play within it, and then activating your unique agency to help overcome it. Complacency reinforces the system of oppression, so we all must find our way of contributing to the needed systems-level change.

There are many resources out there for both knowledge, action and skill development. We offer a starter selection here; however, it by no means complete (and mostly offers North American resources in English), and it is up to each of us to continue to be curious, self-educate and take actions to support a greater understanding of our shared global history of inequity and oppression to support moving towards the critical systems change.

---

TOOLKITS

RACIAL EQUITY TOOLS
This racial equity tool set provides powerful and important content to educate yourself and those around you about the structural and systemic racism that permeates all aspects of our societies.

NEW ERA OF PUBLIC SAFETY TOOLKIT
The result of a task force set up by President Obama after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, this toolkit focuses on specific policy change and actions for a more fair and safe policing.

GARE RACIAL EQUITY TOOLKIT
This toolkit is intended for staff who work in government, elected officials, and community groups who work with the government. There are many city specific toolkits out there, which you can search for online to see specific kits to your region.

CAMPAIGN ZERO TRACKER
Use this tool to track legislation by US state, find representatives to email, research data and reports, also provides downloadable graphics to share and amplify specific actions.

EUROPEAN COALITION FOR CITIES AGAINST RACISM
This series of toolkits is available in 6 languages: German, English, Spanish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Italian and Swedish.

NAPPY & HUMAAANS
If you are creating a campaign, you need images. Find free high res stock photos of Black and Brown people at Nappy and customizable open source illustrations of humans at Humaaans. If you’re looking for a 3D model, check out this Characters of Color series for games and film.

RACE FORWARD KITS
Race Forward focuses on impact and systems change, and it offers many free toolkits from impact assessments, to restaurant workers, as well as online training with sliding scale prices.

COLOR OF CHANGE CAMPAIGN KIT
This is a resource of ongoing campaigns, and how-to resource for creating your own, curated by colorofchange.org.

BRAVE ABOUT RACE
Here is a series of action guides for parents in raising racially literate kids.

MANDATORY SENTENCING TOOLKITS
These are tools to support and take action on reforming the justice system (watch the 13th on Netflix for more on why this is critical).

ORGANIZATIONAL RACE EQUITY TOOLKIT
This is a toolkit to build robust non-performative policies and processes for equity in organizations and corporations from JustLead Washington. Samples of org mission statements are here from Durham County, and if those seem too diplomatic, check out Ben & Jerry’s.

ASIAN AMERICAN RACIAL JUSTICE TOOLKIT
Series of x15 small group training workshops with step by step plans.

NATIVE LAND
Native Land is an interactive map and accompanying educator’s guide on tracing the roots of colonialism, First Nations and Indigenous land acknowledgment, treaties and territories across the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and continually adding more.

---

RESOURCES

10 STEPS TO NON-OPTICAL ALLYSHIP
Created by Mireille Cassandra Harper as a starter kit to go beyond posting and likes.

SUMMER SKOOL
@ckyourprivilege is offering a 12 week summer school via Instagram live with sessions every day at 1pm pst, archived on IGTV.

BLACK LIVES MATTER CARRD
Carrd is a simple one-page site that many people are using to group information together in easily clickable format. There are many out there; this one includes maps of the protests, resources for protestors and petitions and is a good starting point.

BLACK LIVES MATTER CARRD CANADA
Canada shares the longest undefended border in the world with the United States, and along with it, systemic inequities and a shared history of colonization and oppression. Here are some resources that are specific to the Canadian context, including some mental health links.

75 THINGS WHITE PEOPLE CAN DO FOR RACIAL JUSTICE
Organizations to donate to, actions to take, things to read — there is something for everyone on this long list.

DIVEST
Climate change disproportionately and negatively affects POC communities around the world. Divest from institutions that uphold the fossil fuel industry, and use this financial institution report as a start to see where your bank stands, let them know where you stand, and swap where you keep your money.

MENTAL HEALTH AND WELLNESS RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS OF COLOR
Since “recent research has found major disparities in mental health treatment for students across races and ethnic backgrounds,” this resource guide provides a directory of mental health resources for students of color.

LOVELAND THERAPY FUND
Mental health resources for Black women and girls across the United States, with financial assistance available supported through Rachel Cargle’s Loveland partnerships. Apply for mental health support, or donate to the foundation. Also check out this mental health context doc and resource list from Sunshine Health, this guide on traumatization from watching films, and this list of mental health resources.

RACHEL CARGLE'S LIST
From a 30 day free email course, to articles to read, books, templates, Rachel Cargle’s extensive list of resources offers comprehensive and varied ways to upskill and act from template letters to employers and academic institutions, lectures, mental health resources and her Tedx Talk.

INTERACTION INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL CHANGE
Group and organizational training and workshops for social change within organizations, as well as facilitation training.

HOW TO TALK TO YOUR FAMILY ABOUT RACISM
Written by Rachel Cargle, common questions that may come up around the dinner table and how to respond and facilitate conversation.

BLACK TO THE FUTURE
The Black Futures Lab focuses on public policy and voting rights and is taking applications for their leadership training fellowship in progressive race-forward policy governance.

BAIL FUNDS & PETITIONS
One of the many masterlists of bail relief funds, petitions, and other resources for supporting community efforts. On the same topic, divest from companies that profit off prison labour.

---

UNSCHOOLERS WITH EQUITY RELATED INITIATIVES

IF YOU ARE NOT ON THIS LIST AND HAVE A PROJECT YOU WANT TO SHARE, GET IN TOUCH AND LET US KNOW!

SAFE JOHNSON CITY, TN
UnSchool editor, Jamie Ferrell, has organized a campaign to create SAFE (Supporting Acceptance For Everyone) local business resources in her own community.

VANESSA FALOYE
Vanessa is a social justice educator who joined us as a facilitator on on our Cape Town Fellowship and Portugal Educator training. She offers group and organizational training for anti-oppression educational programs.

THE SCHOOL OF PRESSURE
Wisaal Abrahams joined us a facilitator on our Cape Town Fellowship where she lives, and she offers educational workshops on dismantling systems of oppression to academic institutions, corporations and groups.

ROOT CAUSE RESEARCH CENTER
San Fran Fellowship alumni Jessica Bellamy is an information designer and community organizer at this participatory and community based research organization addressing systemic oppression.

CODE TENDERLOIN
Founded by the “Mayor of the Tenderloin” district of San Fran, Del Seymour leads tours around the area and provides free programs for job readiness and coding in the Bay area. Del lead us through the Tenderloin on our San Fran Fellowship.

CREATIVE REACTION LAB
Workshops and programs for youth and educators for racial equity and civic leadership design, founded by Antionette Carroll. Antionette joined us as a mentor during the San Fran UnSchool Fellowship.

ELIMIN8HATE
San Fran Fellowship alumni Ellen Moon’s project for reporting and acting on incidents of anti-Asian racism, hate and violence, mental health resources and community created PSA videos.

QUIRKY30
An NFP school in Cape Town tackling the up to 70% youth unemployment rate by teaching coding for the 4th industrial revolution. Founder Sihle Tshabalala joined us as a mentor during the Cape Town Fellowship.

HEAL THE HOOD
Founder Emile YX equips youth through hip hop culture, dance and entrepreneurship to gain the skills to navigate social systems. Emile joined us as a mentor during the Cape Town Fellowship.

MOKENA MAKEKA
Mokena is an architect (among other things) who designs building to effect social change, from police stations to conventions centers, and joined us an a mentor during Cape Town on the Fellowship.

---

WATCH

Some of the movies and docs are available on subscription services, but if you have chosen to divest from them, or those services are not available in your region, PBS and the Criterion Collection have titles for free, as do libraries, some of which are also available for online streaming like at the New York Public Library. Some of the big movie companies are also making racial equity movies free to watch this month.

MOVIES & DOCS

• American Son (2019)

• See You Yesterday (2019)

• When They See Us (2019)

• Just Mercy (2019)

• The Hate You Give (2018)

• If Beale St Could Talk (2018)

• King in the Wilderness (2018)

• Dear White People (2017)

• Whose Streets? (2017)

• 13th (2016)

• I Am Not Your Negro (2016)

• Selma (2014)

• 16 Shots (2014)

• The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011)

• Malcolm X (1992)

• Mississippi Masala (1991)

• Do The Right Thing (1989)

ONLINE VIDEOS & TALKS

• Neil deGrasse Tyson on Being Black

• LeVar Burton on Being Pulled Over

• LeVar Burton: This is My Story Video Series on Being Black in America

• Racism - what will it take to end it? | Cynthia Silva Parker | TEDxSarasota (Systems of Racism)

• The Sky Didn't Fall: How I Learned to Call Out Racism | Susan Naimark | TEDxJamaicaPlain

• Implicit Bias - how it effects us and how we push through | Melanie Funchess | TEDxFlourCity

• Designing for a more equitable world | Antionette Carroll

• Justice by Design | Antionette Carroll | TEDxHerndon

• My Transformational Journey | Del Seymour | TEDxMoreauCatholicHS

• NPR: So many great podcasts including Code Switch, Invisibilia, and Hidden Brain

• Today Explained: a quick 20min overview updated every day from Vox to explain what just happened, and what does it mean

• Revisionist History (Malcolm Gladwell) Podcast on Black education for Black children and why this is critical

• Resmaa Menakem (therapist and trauma specialist) on the physical impacts of intergenerational trauma

• TEDTalk's playlist about racism in the United States

---

READ

A quick internet search will find many lists of books to read. Bookshop will find and connect you to local independent bookstores so you can divest your retail dollars from Amazon (read about why VP Tim Bray quit over the '“vein of toxicity” that led to leaving his $1million/yr job).

• How To Be An Antiracist (Ibram X. Kendi)

• The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of Colorblindness (Michelle Alexander)

• This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Cherrie Moraga)

• White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Robin DiAngelo, Ph.D.)

• I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness (Austin Channing Brown)

• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Richard Rothstein)

• 'White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide' (Carol Anderson, Ph.D.)

• Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America (Jennifer Harvey, Ph.D.)

• More titles at DiverseBooks.org, along with links to black owned bookstores, articles, and further resources.

• A curated list from editor and writer Dianca London Potts

• A curated list from Rachel Cargle

• A curated list for kids from the NYT by age bracket from 0-12. There are many other lists of books for kids, which you can search online for.

---

FOLLOW

A handful of hashtags and accounts to follow, learn, listen, amplify and expand. There are thousands of industry and city/country specific accounts and tags to discover, from writers, designers, educators, outdoor recreation, sports, health, etc, etc.

#blacklivesmatter
#diversifyyourfeed
#melanated
#amplifymelanatedvoices
#amplifymelanatedvoiceschallenge
#saytheirnames
#blackvoices
#blackleaders

Some examples of hashtag impact here, here and here, along with a short article on the pros and cons (TLDR: good start, but don’t stop there).

@blacklivesmatter
@rachelcargle
@laylafsaad
@yourrightscamp
@ibramxk
@aclu_nationwide
@goodgoodgood
@ethelsclub
@crxlab
@speakoutspeakers
@blackfutureslab
@naacp_ldf

25 more accounts to check out

5 Reasons It’s Time for Nature | World Environment Day 2020

Do you think it’s time for nature? The United Nations does, as “Time for Nature” is the theme for this year’s World Environment Day, which is celebrated each year on the 5th June. Of course it's in our opinion that every day should be a day to celebrate the magical natural beauty of the only known life-sustaining planet in the universe.

But we also wanted to take this opportunity to explore some of the top reasons why biodiversity is so bloody awesome and important, especially in a time where we are challenged by a global pandemic in which many top researchers and scientists warn that nature is sending us a message, drawing clear links between natural systems destruction and the rise of communicable diseases. 

Nature provides all the goods and services we need to operate the economy, not to mention life. We’ve only recently lost sight of the power and importance of nature in our human existence, with the last 70ish years creating the rise of hyper-convenience-fueled lifestyles that in turn created demand for the design of disposability that then led to environmental crises like ocean plastic pollution, climate change, destructive bushfires, freak weather events and deforestation - all issues that impact biodiversity. As these issues continue to be amplified as causes for encouraging sustainable lifestyles to be on the rise, the world is reawakening and reconnecting to the unrivaled power and importance that nature uses in creation and destruction alike. 

Here are five compelling reasons why this theme is so important, right now especially:

1. Biodiversity is critical to ecosystem success

Simply put, biodiversity is what makes Earth, Earth. Without diversity, we have weak systems that are susceptible to disease — which then breeds a new onslaught of system impacts. The UN explains that biodiversity encompasses the over 8 million species – from plants and animals to fungi and bacteria – that are all interconnected and share our planet as home.  All ecosystems need diversity to succeed. The oceans, forests, mountain environments and coral reefs are all teaming with genetic diversity of all manner of plants and animals. Ecosystems sustain human life in a myriad of ways, cleaning our air, purifying our water, ensuring the availability of nutritious foods, nature-based medicines and raw materials, and reducing the occurrence of disasters. 

To learn more about biodiversity and find out more about what you can do, check here for the UN’s “Practical Guide” to Earth Day 2020.

“At least 40 per cent of the world’s economy and 80 per cent of the needs of the poor are derived from biological resources. In addition, the richer the diversity of life, the greater the opportunity for medical discoveries, economic development, and adaptive responses to such new challenges as climate change”. - The Convention about Life on Earth, Convention on Biodiversity

2. All the beauty in the world comes from nature

There’s a reason that #naturephotography is hashtagged over 108 million times on Instagram. No manufactured life experiences can take the place of the beauty of what surrounds us every day in stunning sunrises, lush landscapes, and wondrous wildlife. We humans are biologically hardwired to be connected to nature (more on that in #3), and throughout human history we have been inspired and fulfilled through the unique, diverse natural beauty around the world. This inspiration isn’t just a feel-good philosophical inspiration (though, who doesn’t love to just feel the warm fuzzies when you see a baby animal or take in a breathtaking view) — it’s a literal contribution to the evolution of our species through ideas like biomimicry and circular systems design.  It's also no wonder that one of the most watched TV series of the last fifteen years  was David Antenborugh’s Planet Earth series. 

This collection of videos from TED Ed perfectly explores the wonderment of nature — not just in our environment but truly in an interconnected look at the nature of stuff, the nature of design, the nature of collection action, and of course, the nature of change. 

People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure. - David Attenborough

3. The human brain needs time in nature to restore itself — and thrives when exercising outdoors.

There is mounting evidence that time in nature has huge benefits to the human brain and our bodies. While most attention has been given to the psychological impacts of nature on human well-being, like increased happiness and creativity boosts, other benefits like reduced hypertension and cardiovascular disease, and even lower risks of chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes, and obesity have also been found. 

Over the last 10 years, we’ve learned that healthier soil microbes yield healthier humans (although, Marco Polo noted in 1272 in his travel diary that the people of Persia’s foul moods were attributed to the soil and conducted his own qualitative study by importing soil from Persia to his banquet hall!) and that three days in nature basically resets your brain. Additionally, exercising outdoors (just a walk will do) has shown improved cognition and increased neuroplasticity, which interestingly helps slow aging.  

4. Literally everything we need to sustain our lives comes from nature

Nature is beyond crucial to our personal health and wellbeing, as it provides all the foods, air and drinkable water we need to exist! Complex systems all interact to allow for plants to photosynthesize, create oxygen and filter water. We all are in an interdependent relationship with nature, and as long as we ignore that basic fact of life, we continue to ignore the need for political and cultural changes that will not just protect nature but also find incredibly regenerative solutions that enable us to live within nature and continue to advance our civilization into the future. Technically the services provided by nature are called ecosystem services, and there are more than one could imagine all working together quickly and tirelessly to help life on Earth flourish. So, next time you take a breath or eat a strawberry or drink water and get hydrated, take a moment to think of nature and all the services that the giant ecosystem of Earth provides for us for free. 

Nature’s oxygen factory

Every second breath of oxygen comes from the ocean

5. Nature is in a state of crises too 

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) recently declared that nature is in a state of crises too. Aside from the links between coronavirus, climate change and nature's destruction, nature itself is seeing species being lost at a rate 1,000 times greater than at any other time in recorded human history, and one million species face extinction, making this time what scientists call the sixth great extinction. The only difference is it's not a meteoride this time —  instead, it is us who are responsible for this mass extinction event. Scientists have also found something akin to an insect apocalypse, with bees and other pollinators being killed off in the millions. 

“Healthy ecosystems can protect against the spread of disease: Where native biodiversity is high, the infection rate for some zoonotic diseases can be lowered,” says United Nations Environment programme (UNEP) biodiversity expert Doreen Robinson.  

The foods we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink and the climate that makes our planet habitable all come from nature.

Yet, these are exceptional times in which nature is sending us a message:

To care for ourselves
we must care for nature. 

It’s time to wake up.
To take notice.
To raise our voices.

It’s time to build back better
for People and Planet.

Find out more here

This World Environment Day,
it’s Time for Nature.

---

So yes, it’s absolutely time for nature not just today, but every single day, from now until we figure this shit out and implement transformational systems change. 

To further celebrate and help you get activated to support the global transition to a sustainable and regenerative economy, we are having a flash 50% off sale on everything over at online.unschools.co for this week until June 12! Use code: timefornature all week (ends midnight 5th June GMT time)

Alumni Abi Mapúa: Academic Innovation Incubation & Service Design

Abi joined us on the San Francisco Fellowship from Manila, Philippines. She is a social designer working to drive forward innovation in her home community and wider global network. We caught up with her to hear about her creative change initiatives and how the UnSchool experience has impacted her work.

Can you give us an introduction to yourself and your work?

Hello, I am Abi Mapúa-Cabanilla! If I am to sum up what I do, I consider myself an environmental sustainability driver and social designer. Having worked at the intersections of academia, local communities and the private sector, I’ve had the opportunity to cross-pollinate various disciplines and facilitate co-creation of catalytic innovation.

These roles manifest in the two hats I wear: First, as Founding Director at the Hub of Innovation For Inclusion [HIFI] of the De La Salle - College of Saint Benilde, a university-based innovation space that drives the development of academic-driven ventures, programs, research, and learning experiences for the triple bottom line of equity among people, planet-enriching, and profit-sustaining. 

HIFI social startup founders and Mr. Peter D. Garrucho Jr. (man in suit), donor of HIFI (Abi far left). Photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa (left).

Second, as Co-Founder of KindMind, a service design laboratory that helps individuals, organizations, and governments generate business value from the design of services and experiences that are meaningful to people and nurture the planet.

KindMind workshop with a major restaurant chain)on experience design of dining and customer journey mapping. Photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa.

What motivates you to do the work that you do?

Being in a country (the Philippines) gifted with so many natural resources, biodiversity, and gentle people, it pains me to experience a hodgepodge of problems like the loss of habitats and biodiversity, erosion of our culture and identity, continued poverty and inequality, and the ultimate lack of systems understanding and political will to build our nation. 

This pain has been my pilot and motivation to continue working and build new models that will hopefully bring much needed change. Cliché as it may seem, I believe the Filipino is worth ‘designing’ for.

How did you find out about the UnSchool, and what motivated you to come?

I found out about the UnSchool because I have been reading up on Systems Thinking, design, and changemaking as part of my work. I’ve been very intrigued about the tools the UnSchool develops and its whole mindset of enhancing the agency of each person for disruptive change. 

A lot of what I do with youth and communities is really about transforming mindsets and behavior — the work of the UnSchool resonates so much and this motivated me to take a chance and apply as a fellow.

What was your experience at the UnSchool like?

The UnSchool experience in SF was a memorable one. Aside from the fact that SF is one of my favorite cities in the world, the program allowed me to see what other individuals from different fields across the globe are doing.

I learned so much from the rich conversations we had, that are not necessarily about agreeing. I love the fact that it did not seem like we were preaching to a group of converts but it was really about sharpening our skills to deeply understand contexts, listen, and learn to articulate perspectives. The UnSchool experience affirmed the work I do and fueled me to be braver yet more sensitive to nuances and systemic relationships.

Abi and her team during the San Francisco Fellowship. Photo from the UnSchool blog.

What was the main take away you had from coming to the UnSchool?

That the future belongs to the brave.

Tell us more about your initiative(s), and how is it all going?

Innovation incubation has often been synonymous with a myopia over specific product and/or service development and scaling to solve problems, instead of understanding the many factors surrounding our social/environmental ills. 

Abi: “Organised the first Climathon in the Philippines under Climate-KIC. We are first city enabler and Pasig City is the city host. With me in the photo is Pasig City Mayor (middle) Vico Sotto and Benilde Chancellor Bob Tang.” (Photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa)

HIFI programs have been driving the value of systemic change and the concept of sustainable proportionality rather than business scale at all time and at all costs. This can be seen in a number of youth-driven projects we support and help develop from the redesign of consumption to embrace post-disposable lifestyles, sustainable fashion, sustainable furniture, urban revitalization, and inclusive mobility to name a few.

How did the UnSchool help you start/evolve it?

The experience definitely enriched and transcended into the programs I create and run. 

How have you amplified this change you do in the world?

As part of my service design, systems mapping and human-centered design research work with KindMind, I have been helping out organizations and government agencies look into leverage points surrounding the issues of climate change, disaster resilience, and marine litter in the Philippines (our country ranks 3rd in the world for both disaster hotspot and ocean plastics contributor). I would like to believe that the country is still in its nascent stages of awareness and action. 

KindMind workshop with a major restaurant chain)on experience design of dining and customer journey mapping. Photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa.

A major part of my work has been to facilitate conversations, deep dive workshops, and action towards a rethinking and redesign of production and consumption to embrace a circular model because there is huge business value and opportunities we can derive from it. 

Creating a platform that will allow me to work with international NGOs, private corporations, and government agencies who play pivotal roles and create huge impact, whether good or bad, is our KindMind way to scale change.

A few of the social startups we mentor and support: Sunny Po. Fruit cider drink from our indigenous tribes in the Mountain Province (photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa).

A few of the social startups we mentor and support: Kamulo. Furnitures made from construction and denim waste (photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa).

A few of the social startups we mentor and support: Ha.Mu. Wearable art made from fast fashion waste (photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa).

How can people engage with, support, or follow your work?

People and organisations interested in working with the academe on developing inclusive innovations may reach me via HIFI. 

If they would like to improve the way people live, work and scale impact through the design of services, experiences, and organisational processes they may reach me via KINDMIND. 

You may also ping me on LinkedIn!

Abi and her WIFI team (photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa).

The Case for a Post Covid-19 Sustainable Recovery

As the world starts to reawaken from its months of in-house sheltering during the COVID-19 crises, there are calls from around the world for the rebuilding of the economy to be done through a green and sustainable pathway. The lockdown has shown many people just how urgent our sustainability needs are. There are many links drawn between natural habitat destruction, climate change, air pollution and other environmental issues connected to the rise and devastation of a pandemic such as COVID-19. The head of the UN called for a global green recovery, and many governments are seeing the links between the climate and the COVID-19 crises. With recovery talks emerging and governments around the world beginning to propose new budgets, we thought we’d take a look at who is (and who is not) focused on implementing sustainability initiatives in their COVID-19 response and future planning.

Dan Meyers via Unsplash.com

The European Union 

Right before this crisis, the EU voted to approve the Green Deal, which sets out ambitious plans for a clean and circular economy that has no new net carbon emissions by 2050. This pandemic has emphasized the urgency of implementing the Paris Agreement, with Germany and the UK collaborating to virtually lead the the 11th Petersberg Climate Dialogue earlier in April, in which they, along with 30 countries, discussed how to begin recovery with the caveat of climate protection being linked to the economic perspective. The EU’s proposed Green Recovery also highlights the need to protect biodiversity and invest in “sustainable mobility, renewable energy, building renovations, research and innovation, and the circular economy.” While there isn’t unanimous agreement among all nations of the EU, there is certainly a majority that are in favor of using the European Green Deal as a framework for recovery, leading to rich discussions and (hopefully) favorable outcomes.  

“The restart can lead to a healthier and more resilient world for everyone.” - U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres (Source)

As usual, the main pushback against green initiatives is coming from a fiscal perspective (these are the people who created the reductive, linear economy based on the hyper consumption loop, after all). We saw this happen in 2008’s recession as well — carbon dioxide levels drastically dropped and then resurged with a vengeance due to carbon-intensive stimulus spending. As such, hundreds of the world’s top economists have banded together to advise that we learn from the 2008 crisis and choose more wisely this time by investing stimulus spending in climate action, stating that “post-crisis green stimulus can help drive a superior economic recovery.” This resounding call for a green recovery is also heard from the general populace, with over a million EU citizens sharing their support for green investments. Specific countries are also putting in measures such as France offering subsidies for bike repairs to entice people to bike rather than drive.

“The current crisis is a stark reminder of how closely human and planetary health are interlinked - only together can people and nature thrive. A green recovery means restoring nature, protecting our environment, and accelerating the transition to a carbon-neutral and resilient economy. MEPs must lead the way." - Ester Asin, director of the WWF European Policy Office (Source)

Markus Spiske via Unsplash.com

New Zealand 

Aside from having the leader many of us want for our own countries in Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (The Atlantic hailed her as “the world’s most effective leader”), New Zealand has given personhood to a river, prioritized wellness as part of their economy, and now they are looking at ways they can rebuild in a greener and more sustainable way. For example, in the $50B recovery budget that was just proposed, they’ve allocated $1B toward environmental spend, creating 11,000 news jobs, and $430M is included for unemployed people to help clean up rivers and restore wetlands, as well as $300M is being allotted to prevent loss of biodiversity. To further improve energy efficiency, New Zealand is also investing $56M in their heating and insulation program, which simultaneously improves citizens’ health and thus reduces their vulnerabilities to diseases like COVID-19.

Dan Freeman via Unsplash.com

United States 

Politics and science continue to be at odds in the US, with environmental science particularly taking a hit since the current administration took office in 2017 and proceeded to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, roll back regulations on emissions in favor of the fossil fuel industry, and aggressively cut trees on public lands, among many other actions that have drastically changed and reduced US environmental policies. A bright spot came about, however, when the Green New Deal was proposed in 2019, led by the popular Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While widely rejected at the vote, the Green New Deal continues to be a powerful framework for progressive ideas and is currently being praised by scientists for its relevance to the COVID-19 recovery. While as a whole the US is falling behind on the world stage in this matter, a few progressive states like California are talking about how clean energy jobs can be significant in economic recovery, and thought leaders are at least envisioning what the future of the US could look like with green initiatives in place. For now, it’s still a fantasy, but we remain hopeful. 

Researchers from University of Massachusetts working on the potential of growing crops under solar panels panels and the mutual benefits with agriculture (via Unsplash.com).

Asia

China and South Korea are leading the way in investing in sustainable recovery among Asian nations. With a total of $7T pledged as economic stimulus, China is heavily investing in infrastructure for electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart cities and smart grids, and healthier cities via focusing on reducing pollution, implementing stricter emissions standards, improving health facilities, creating more space for exercise, and promoting road safety. 

South Korea has emerged as an international leader in pandemic recovery. It became the first country to hold a national election amidst this pandemic, and as a result has championed a 2050 carbon neutrality goal, along with proposals for an impressive green recovery. Publishing a “climate manifesto” and giving nod to the EU’s Green Deal for Europe and the US’s Green New Deal, the plan includes “large-scale investments in renewable energy, the introduction of a carbon tax, the phase-out of domestic and overseas coal financing by public institutions, and the creation of a Regional Energy Transition Centre to support workers transition to green jobs.” 

Seoul by Daniel Bernard via Unsplash.com

Canada

While Canada has come under scrutiny for being off course on its Paris Agreement Goals, the pandemic recovery could certainly catalyze more urgent climate action. One such initiative was unveiled in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement that corporate relief money will be awarded on the contingency that companies commit to climate action. They’ll be expected to “publish annual reports on climate investments, detailing how they plan to reduce their environmental footprints, and how their operations support the country’s commitments made under the Paris climate agreement.” Other leaders are urging clean energy investments, and Vancouver’s mayor is part of a global task force committed to supporting a recovery that helps the transition to a sustainable, regenerative, low-carbon future.  

Ali Tawfiq via Unsplash.com

At the UnSchool, we are deeply committed to creating tools and resources that support the transformation to a sustainable, regenerative and circular economy. We see a strong need for more leadership in companies, governments and many organizations.

So, we are working hard on a series of new online learning systems around executive and business leadership. Over the next few months, we will be unveiling a suite of new tools and learning programs to support the rapid uptake of progressive changes to the way we do business. 

Stay tuned to find out more!

A year of Activating Change

It’s Week 52, which means we have officially spent an entire year writing and sharing new insights and ideas about how to make a positive impact on the world around us! What a year it has been — from hosting a Fellowship in Malaysia, to collaborating with the UNEP in creating our Anatomy of Action campaign, through to this moment in time, in which we’re hunkering down and figuring out new ways to support and activate positive change in the midst of a global pandemic. So this week we decided to put together a list of highlights of all the cool, creative changemaking things that we’ve talked about and experienced in the last year to get us all motivated for another 52 weeks of making positive world-changing change!

Week 1: One Person Can’t Save the World, But Everyone Can Change It

Global Climate Strike 09-20-2019 (photo by Markus Spiske via Unsplash.com)

In this inaugural article that launched the UnSchool Journal, our founder Leyla Acaroglu lays the groundwork for how we can start seeing the world’s problems as opportunities to activate our agency and make positive change — because intentionally or not, all of our actions already are changing the world around us: The power to make change lies in our personal ability to see our own agency and opportunity for for creative leadership and to then make intentional choices about how we will activate the influence we organically have on the world around us, while working on enhancing this to a point where we can actively make more positive systems change.  Read on >

Week 11: Yes, Recycling Is Broken

Photo: Vivianne Lemay via Unsplash.com

With plastic pollution totally out of control and systems in chaos following China’s decision to stop processing a large portion of the world’s recycling, we unmasked the harsh reality that recycling is a placebo that justifies and perpetuates waste: Recycling is a lovely idea when it works; in fact it's a fundamental part of the circular economy, after, of course, sharing services, remanufacturing and repair. But like any system that displaces the responsibility somewhere out of sight, the externalities come back around to bite us all in the ass eventually. Ocean plastic waste is just one of the massive unintended consequences of relying on a quick fix, which then, in turn, reinforces the problem you are trying to solve. Systems thinking 101: the easy way out often leads back in, and there are often no quick fixes to complex problems. Recycling as a solution has reinforced the problem, and now we are dealing with a ‘frankenproblem’. Read it >

Week 14: Systems Thinking 101

Creative problems solving requires a systems mindset, and that’s why systems thinking is one of the core pillars of the UnSchool’s core pillars. In this article, we dive into the foundations of systems thinking and share practical knowledge to help level up your systems mindset: A concept stuck in theory does little for the greater good. Understanding that everything is interconnected and being able to apply this knowledge as a tool for effecting change are two different things, and what’s most important is the practical experience plus the applied tools to turn theories into action. To move from ideas in the brain to practice in the real world, it helps to be equipped with the distilled and applicable knowledge about which tools can be used and how to apply these in ways that achieve the desired outcome — which in our case is always positive social & environmental change. Read it >

Week 18: Introducing our UNEP Collaboration: The Anatomy of Action

We were honored to collaborate with the United Nations Environmental Programme to create a project with the intention of activating sustainable living and lifestyles by exploring what types of actions individuals can take that will actually have an impact, if replicated and normalized, as part of people's everyday lifestyle actions. We launched the Anatomy of Action at UNESCO in Paris. We wanted to not only design something that supports lifestyle changes for sustainable living, but also base it on a deeper understanding of what is working, along with why and how to amplify it so that we get new types of behavior norms that encourage positive shifts within the economy: The action set presented in the Anatomy of Action shows everyday lifestyle swaps that fit easily into daily lifestyle choices. I drew heavily on behavioral and cognitive sciences to gain an insight into how to frame these actions as opportunities rather than losses, as the reality with sustainability is that it is a massive opportunity! Read it >

Week 28: The UnSchool Kuching Fellowship Recap

UnSchool Fellowships are nothing short of amazing, as we take a small group of creative changemakers on a weeklong, immersive adventure into activating positive change via systems thinking, sustainability, and design…as well as feast on exquisite local vegetarian cuisine, dive deep into our personal potential, and make lifelong friends. The Kuching Fellowship was the 10th (!) UnSchool Fellowship; it took place on the island of Borneo (Malaysia) in November, 2019. The Kuching cohort included seventeen fellows from nine different countries, and our Fellowship blog shares a day-by-day look at the adventures. Read it >

Week 41: Sneak Peek at the NEW Design Systems Change Handbook by Leyla

Leyla released her fifth handbook in her series on making change! Titled Design Systems Change, it’s packed with new insights and ideas on how to expand your sphere of influence and contribute to the transition to a circular, regenerative future. It’s also a workbook, complete with interactive reflections and actions to help expand your capacity to make change. This article includes a sneak peek at the introduction and first section on design: Just as it can accidentally make a mess, design can also be a catalyst for positive and significant change. This is because, at its core, design is about creative problem solving and forming something new that works better than the past version.  Read it >

Week 47: #StayPositive Brain-Boosting 30-Day Challenge

On April 1st, 2020, smack in the middle of COVID-19’s world takeover, we started our 30-Day Brain-Boosting Challenge to help get people motivated to stay positive, make change and develop their agency to get cool shit done for a positive, regenerative and sustainable future. And good news: you can still sign up! This article shares more details on how this challenge unfolds and helps you level up your changemaking abilities: Read it >

(BONUS COVID-related content: in Week 45, we took a look at how social distancing is doing some good for the planet!)

Week 49: Get More Vegetables in Your Life with our NEW Hero Veg Cookbook!

Join us in celebrating the hidden heroes of our lives, vegetables (yep!), in this fun journal article that announces the release of Leyla Acaroglu + Emma Segal’s co-authored plant-based cookbook. Hand illustrated by Emma and filled with recipes from their childhood and current cooking adventures, along with things Leyla has learnt on the CO Project Farm and collaborations from the kitchen, this cookbook guides you in the art of intuitive cooking based on a veg-centric philosophy. And hey, there’s even some recipes for you to try in a special preview of the book ;) Read it >

Thanks for taking a trip down memory lane with us in this year in review! We also had loads of amazing inspiring alumni profile spotlights; a 5-year birthday celebration and thoughts on 5 more years; thought-provoking reflections on greenwashing, plastic bans, and other changemaking topics; an exploration of our digital footprint that includes a full audit report; zero waste party hacks and lots, lots more!

What should we write about this year?

Leave us a comment and let us know what kind of content you’d like to see next!

Alumni Kunal Kanase: First Generation STEAM Learners

Kunal is an incredibly inspiring Alumni who joined us on the Mumbai fellowship in 2017. We caught up with him to find out how his UnSchool experience impacted his work in his community in India for teaching youth how to code. 

(Photo: Maker’s Asylum) Q&A session in Innovation Programme called DIVE (Design Innovation Venture Entrepreneurship) at Maker's Asylum, Mumbai

Can you give us an introduction to yourself and your work?

I am a first-generation lifelong learner who happened to be born and brought up in Dharavi, India which is one of the largest slums in the world. I have focused my learning pursuits on Engineering, Arts & Humanities, Sciences, and Design, I work through online learning and multi-potentiality through Interdisciplinary research to solve problems of underprivileged and lower-income communities and to positively impact nature.

I had been involved in the Slum & Rural Innovation Project called Dharavi Diary as a fellow and manager of the learning space to co-create the community of first-generation learners through STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, & Math) Education. (A first-generation learner is a person who comes from a family where there has previously not been any access to education, and so is the first generation to gain access to educational content.) 

Facilitating kids' learning at the learning center, Dharavi Diary

What motivates you to do the work that you do?

“Poverty is not just a lack of money; it is not having the capability to realize one’s full potential.”

- Abhijeet Banerjee, Nobel Prize 2019

I was born and brought up in an 8x12 feet hut with an alcoholic father, a depressed mother, and 2 siblings within a dysfunctional family in an underprivileged community in Dharavi where people struggle for the most basic of needs and survival is the main purpose of their life. My parents are illiterate, my father migrated from a rural part of India in search of livelihood and my mother was born and grew up in Dharavi as well. We belong to Scheduled Caste (officially designated group of historically disadvantaged people and depressed class in India).

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

- Max Planck, Nobel Prize 1918

I was the first generation in my family to pursue engineering studies, however, due to practical reasons and adverse & unfortunate situations in the family, I dropped out of my university education. In those challenging times, I discovered learning as a fantastic process to examine and understand the problems I was facing. I developed a passion to find the roots of things through research and critical thinking and became a hard-core MOOC-learner and now approach multi-potentiality through online learning to solve problems of lower-income communities that are unique and left unsolved due to many reasons. 

Kunal demonstrating VR experience to teenagers at one of the excluded places in Dharavi, Mumbai

I care for the good health and well-being of myself and others. Having faced those problems and living in harsh conditions, I have empathized with various issues that require knowledge from different disciplines to find solutions. 

How did you find out about the UnSchool, and what motivated you to come?

I have co-created the community learning space with 150+ students and 8 teachers from K to 12 over 5 years at Dharavi Diary where I was Fellow, Lead Facilitator of Learning, Manager, Coordinator, Teacher Trainer, Creative Content Designer, and Mentor and worked as a Lead Facilitator of Learning focused on experiential learning for STEAM aligned Sustainable Development Goals.

(Photo: Maker’s Asylum) While brainstorming in DIVE at Maker's Asylum, Mumbai

I participated as a member of the Dharavi Diary Scholar for the Mumbai Fellowship program in November 2017 to learn more about the design process, research, and systems thinking in the field of sustainability to advance my skills in interdisciplinary research and to collaborate with change agents from diverse backgrounds to create unique and impactful solutions.

What was your experience at the UnSchool like?

Thrilling and adventurous! It was the first time in my life I collaborated with other humans to work on a project. I gained various insights, gained different perspectives, and learned fantastic tools for problem-solving in a rich, creative, and conducive environment which resulted in an amazing project over a period of 7 immersive days. The experience was so enriching and impacted deeply on me.

What was the main take away you had from coming to the UnSchool?

Leonardo Da Vinci is my role model and I always try to learn from him. I had a fascination for the man and his work but couldn’t find (read) much about him except his Wikipedia page. A decade ago, I had been searching for a text on him and one day found a book called ‘Think Like Da Vinci’. I was so excited to learn about him and enlighted with the ‘Seven Da Vincian Principles’ given by the author are Curiosita, Dimostrazione, Sensazione, Sfumato, Arte/Scienza, Corporalita, Connessione. I used to ponder a lot of these principles which eventually integrated into me. 

One of the seven principles, Connessione, means ‘A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Systems Thinking.’ I couldn’t see ‘Systems Thinking’ in action until I participated in the UnSchool fellowship where I learned more about it and how to use it in the real world. That was a fantastic experience and the main take away from the UnSchool.

The first night of the UnSchool Mumbai Fellowship (from the UnSchool blog)

Tell us more about your initiative(s), and how is it all going?

Since I had to drop out of my university education, I consequently fell into a depression and was traumatized for a few years because I had been so ambitious and had struggled a lot to get to go to college to start with. In those challenging times, I discovered learning as a fantastic process to examine and understand the problems I was personally facing. As a result, I developed a passion for finding the roots of things through research and critical thinking, tools I could discover through online learning. 

I am continuing the endeavor by learning on online platforms like NPTEL, edX, and Coursera to explore various disciplines to do interdisciplinary research. I have completed 20 courses which include subjects like SDG, Design Thinking, Positive Psychology, Innovation, Anthropology, Management, Futures Thinking, Cognition, Problem Solving, etc. and pursuing more courses on Linguistic, Psychology, Data Science, Architecture, Graphic Design, Soft Skills, Philosophy, AI, Creative Thinking, Programming, etc. I have also planned to complete Electrical Engineering and Computer Science studies to develop technical competency for innovation and problem-solving. 

Recently, I have worked on the project while studying Innovation for teenagers in slums who are prone to alcoholism and how to make them conscious about the ill-effects of alcoholism using Virtual Reality and Storytelling and looking forward to work on more such projects in the future.

How did the UnSchool help you start/evolve it?

It all started at UnSchool. That was the first time I had ever collaborated with people from diverse backgrounds to solve problems faced in Slums. We worked on my case study of how curiosity can change the course of cognitive constraints and give breakthroughs. 

UnSchool and Dharavi Diary collaboration and systems thinking workshop day (founder Nawneet Ranjan on far right) from the UnSchool blog

The UnSchool Fellowship has ever since been helping me in my approach to facing challenges as I learned many tools and techniques to solve problems and find creating solutions. 

How can people engage with, support, or follow your work?

As a first-generation learner and with my complex historical and family background, I couldn’t get the opportunity to learn in osmosis with ‘learned and knowledgeable’ class of society and couldn’t be in proximity with people who can guide, encourage, support, mentor, share, collaborate to bring the best out of me to grow.

Social support and network are of paramount importance but I have been deprived of it as Dharavi is still backward in many areas despite being located in one of the most important metro cities in the world called Mumbai. Thanks to the Internet which is a blessing for learners like me who can get access to world-class education and meet/network people, communities, and organizations like UnSchool to learn from. I have a vision and potential to make an impact and need support, mentorship, and guidance to advance the efforts.

My coordinates are as follows:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/Kanase.Kunal

Any other thoughts you want to share?

I am grateful to the UnSchool and family forever!

———

During the Covid Crises, Kunal’s organization is raising funds to help feed families who live in Dhalvari.

Perspectives on Earth Day 50

By Leyla Acaroglu, originally published here

Last week, on Wednesday, April 22, it was the 50th celebration of Earth Day, a single day marked in the 365/6 days in a human-described calendar year that is dedicated to remembering or celebrating that we all need the Earth to survive. In my opinion, that should be inverted, and every day should be Earth Day, given we all live here, on the only known life-sustaining planet in the universe — yet we have, in the last 50 years, managed to make a complete mess of things. 

In 1968, astronauts headed toward the moon snapped a photo of the Earth from space, and this was beamed back to the millions of humans watching the Apollo 8 mission. For the first time in the history of humanity, we saw our home in all its fragile beauty from space, rising above the infinite black of the universe, and it changed the way the world saw our home, planet Earth. The image, etched into the psyche of all who have come since, is called Earthrise, and it helped spur on the burgeoning environmental movement. Maj. Gen. William A. Anders, the astronaut who took the photo, said that it changed the world: "We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth." 

Earthrise Photo: NASA taken by Apollo 8 crewmember Bill Anders on December 24, 1968, at mission time 075:49:07

In the preceding years, the EPA was set up and the Clean Air Act passed in the USA. There were huge protests and some changes, there were clean ups and crack downs. But there was never a change in the way we do things, really. 

Now we have high definition, full color detailed satellite photos of every inch of our Earth — we can zoom in to see ice caps melting and rainforests on fire (remember when in 2019 it was a thing in Malaysia and Brazil to intentionally burn down rainforests to create farmland? Can you recall the devastating fires that ravaged Australia?). We know what we have, what we had, what we are losing...but do we know the cost? Back in the 1970s, “Americans had become increasingly aware that the same industrialization that had made the country wealthy was having an impact on the environment and their own health,” according to a reflection published in Scientific America this week. The article goes on to show all the exponentially growing graphs of ecological decay that have occurred since that day 50 years ago, when hundreds of thousands of Americans marched for planet protection, many of them now probably reaping the benefits of the industries that have gone on to pollute indiscriminately. This, of course, is not new to Earth System Scientists, as it was in the early 2000s when they first published these profound “Great Acceleration” graphs. They show the recurring hockey stick curves skyrocketing up into uncharted territories across many human socio-cultural changes and natural system impacts, all starting in 1950. 

The Great Acceleration Graphs, 2004, International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, Image Source

“It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change. In a single lifetime humanity has become a planetary-scale geological force,” — Professor Will Steffen, International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

The last 70 years have seen some incredible changes to our societies, culture, technology and all the planetary systems. We now live in a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, where every centimeter of this planet has been changed by humans in some way. For the last 10,000 years, we have lived in the climate-stable Holocene period, allowing our species to grow ourselves, crops and our seemingly endless desire for natural systems destruction. Since the 1950s, however, we have entered into the Anthropoecene’s man-made era of ecological decay, and we are suffering the costs on many fronts. 

Nature is magic, yet we do unimaginable things to it for our own collective benefits, irrespective of all the other systems and species that contribute to the life-giving interplay that makes life on Earth possible. 

The tragic trade-off of our expansion and domination over the globe is all too obvious. Take a peek at any one of the exponentially-growing environmental concerns: ocean plastic waste, air pollution, deforestation, the Sixth Great Extinction, climate change. As we sit stuck in our homes, lamenting and stressing about the killer virus sweeping through our communities and blaming it on bats, we forget that we made all of this mess. We destroyed the habitats, we created the market for live animals, we facilitated the air pollution and environmental conditions that are starting to be correlated with high death rates of COVID-19. We lit the match that started the fire, and we are responsible for finding the means to extinguish it without destroying the place in the process. 

We don’t have direct evidence that climate change is influencing the spread of COVID-19, but we do know that climate change alters how we relate to other species on Earth and that matters to our health and our risk for infections. As the planet heats up, animals big and small, on land and in the sea, are headed to the poles to get out of the heat. That means animals are coming into contact with other animals they normally wouldn’t, and that creates an opportunity for pathogens to get into new hosts. — Dr. Aaron Bernstein, interim director of Harvard University’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Source

Earth Day reminds some people —  but let's be honest, not that many, and probably not the ones who are at the forefront of the damage to begin with — that we have a debt to the damage we have done. But in the last 50 years of “celebrating” it, we have done far more destruction than protection. Locking nature up in parks, reserves and protected spaces does nothing to realign our species with the harsh and critical reality that without nature, we are nothing — without the complex interplay between all the systems around us, we have no food, no fresh water, no atmosphere, no oxygen, no culture, no stable operating environment for our species to inhabit. We are nature, we are the systems that we destroy, and as long as we only prioritize a single day to blink at this reality, we will continue to allow the decay of the most beautiful planet in the universe. 

As long as you live here, remember: every day is Earth Day. 

-------

Believe it or not, individual actions do have impacts. I have done several projects and initiatives that help us all take action, own the agency that we have in this system and make positive change:

• Anatomy of Action, a sustainable lifestyle initiative we collaborated with the UN to create 

• The Post Disposable Activation Kit 

• The Circular Classroom, free educational toolkit on sustainability  

• Superpower activation kit 

• 30-day brain activating #staypositive challenge 

• The Hero Veg Cookbook

Get more Vegetables in Your Life with our NEW Hero Veg Cookbook!

By Leyla Acaroglu

🥁 Drum Roll Please 🥁

Emma Segal and I are excited to announce the launch of our NEW cookbook collaboration where we set about creating a celebration of the hidden heroes in our lives: vegetables. Yep, delicious, nutrient-packed, immune-system-building vegetables!

After years of cooking, eating and experimenting, we are so happy to share The Hero Veg Cookbook with the world! It’s designed to illuminate the secret, often-overlooked powers of plants (for our bodies AND for our planet’s health). Through our fun-to-read, easy-to-follow plant-based cookbook, you can also activate your curiosity and problem-loving superpowers by leveraging the art of experimentation through intuitive cooking (but don’t worry — the recipes ARE written in a standard format!).

We have been working together for several years through the UnSchool, Disrupt Design and the CO Project Farm, where we have made thousands of vegetable-centric meals, in all sorts of locations, challenging conditions and crazy scenarios so that we could feed our fellowship and workshop participants nutritious, delicious, brain-building plant-based food. Independently, we are both fascinated by vegetarian cooking, and we are always seeking out new ways of transforming vegetables into unique and delicious meals. After 2 years of hard work, we have finally assembled over 160 recipes in a 250+ page illustrated cookbook that is now here and ready to share with the world, right at a time when more and more people are embracing the benefits of a more sustainable lifestyle and looking for ways to boost immune strength.

About the Hero Veg CookBook

It’s hand illustrated by Emma and filled with recipes from our childhoods and current cooking adventures, along with things Leyla has learnt on the CO Project Farm and collaborations from the kitchen.

To complement the heroes, we have many sidekick recipes and fascinating facts about each of the 30 vegetables we included as heroes in the book — not to mention many pages of fascinating information on the health and sustainability benefits of eating more veg!

Through the years of running UnSchool programs and now hosting hundreds of people on the CO Project Farm through our community open days and sustainability workshops, we have explored and refined a series of hero vegetable recipes that are easy to make nearly anywhere, often with just a few ingredients.  We have mastered the art of creating elaborate, beautiful, colorful, flexible and adaptable plant-based meals that can feed and satisfy you, your family, and even groups of around 25 people or more (as that’s how many people we end up with on our fellowships). These recipes were tried and tested in many cases on people who have not had a lot of vegetarian (or not very good vegetarian!) meals in their life and have received rave reviews, so if you’re looking to add more plants to your plate or help others whose taste buds need convincing, then this is the cookbook for you.

To get a taste (pun definitely intended) of what this cookbook’s pages hold, we’re sharing here some excerpts that will leave your mouth watering and your mind hungry for plant-based change (food puns are just way too easy!). We can’t wait to see what you’re cooking and how you adapt these recipes to make them your own, so be sure to tag us at @COProjectFarm with your yummy food pix!

A Vegetable-Centric Food Philosophy 

Nearly all plants are still alive when taken from their parents... a bit creepy, but also an incredible part of the cycle of life. Eat fresh living things and all the colors of the rainbow that have been grown in ways that increase the nutrients that each mouthful can bring you. 

Our cooking philosophy is based on what we call “intuitive cooking” —  like driving a car, after a while you have done it enough times to be confident to do it without the stress and concerns you felt the first few times you took to the wheel. Each section of this book has been laid out to walk you through the process of learning how to turn vegetables into delicious and healthy dishes that will impress you and your friends. We also wanted to bust some myths, share zero waste cooking ti[s and help you find the right mix of healthy vegetables based dishes for your life and location. We are not fans of exact measurements, but we have included indications and suggestions. We always encourage you to explore and experiment with them and see what works for you. 

There are somewhere around 20,000 edible vegetables and plants in the world, and yet we only eat around 10% of those. Exploring the world of edible plants is an adventure that you could and should spend your whole life doing, but to help you get started, we have laid this book out in alphabetical order, across the 30 easiest to find vegetables around the world. They are the heroes of recipes from Thailand to Italy, and we take great pride in sharing this selection of easy-to-make and delicious-to-eat plant heroes that are staples in our kitchens! As we have co-written this book, we have also learned new recipes and techniques off each other, adapting our styles to work together when we get the chance to cook for people, and also finding the other person's tips to be very useful in our own stock of standard recipes. That's the beauty of cooking — you always learn how to make things taste better every time you take on the challenge to prepare a meal!

How To Use The Cookbook 

This is a cookbook that doesn’t really tell you how to cook; it’s more about sharing general guidelines to support you on a DIY adventure through the wonderful world of vegetables and is designed to invite you to develop the cooking confidence and creativity to make vegetables the heroes of your plate. Everyone has their own tastes, preferences, access to certain ingredients and time to spend putting stuff together. So instead of giving traditional very measured out recipes, this cookbook uses approximations from our own experiences and operates like a creative template. You will find that we have included ingredients and rough measurements based on what we would do whilst cooking that recipe, as our goal is to encourage you to adapt and expand based on your situation, which can spin off recipes into a new direction. There are some basic principles of cooking veg that are really important, and we have included all these insights. Once you master the basics, then you are set to get them shining in their full hero glory. 

We believe that cooking is about developing intuition and your own processes over time. Everyone is different, so the level of salt, spice and other flavorings will change based on your preferences and the availability of ingredients. That's why we provide amounts and ingredients as a guide and you can adjust as needed.  

This may stress some of you out, but please give it a try! We have added some descriptions of the basics in this cookbook so you can master them and move onto your own variations and creative interpretations. Over time, the more we learn anything, the more freedom we have to get experimental. Our goal is to inspire you to become an intuitive vegetable cook, so when you look in your fridge and see a couple of single veggies, you can come up with a creative outcome to bring them to life. We often play the game of how many delicious things we can make out of whatever is left in the fridge, making it up as we go.

The best way to use this book is to have a read, and then when you are hungry, need to cook for friends, want to experiment or just need some inspiration then find the veg you have most readily available to you, land on a recipe and get cooking! 

20 Sidekick Pantry Staples

In the book, we not only offer up recipes for the veg heroes of our lives, but also for the sidekicks that truly make them sing! Think: sauces, dressings, preserves, grain-based sidekicks like pizza dough (yup), nut cheeses, dips, and more! Here’s a sample of some of the sidekicks that we consider essential:

1. Olive oil is great in a more Mediterranean region, or if you are in a tropical region where coconuts are abundant, then local coconut oil is great. Similarly, if you are in a region with another local and abundant oil, use that. Local is always best!

2. Salt makes the flavor of everything come out. Different kinds of salt are great to have around and experiment with — some are saltier than others, some have a more mineral taste, some are great for dramatic sprinkles on top and others are best for cooking as they dissolve more easily. 

3. Black pepper to grind fresh (using a mortar and pestle if you have one is also a great stress reliever!).

4. Sweetener such as cane sugar, coconut sugar, palm sugar, maple sugar, agave, stevia — again whatever is closest to your region is best, otherwise try for something that hasn’t been super refined.

5. Honey, as local as possible to support local apiaries and plants, and is also then a natural way for your body to develop antibodies to local pollens. Some cities now also have programs to build hives in gardens and rooftops to help build habitat for these critically important pollinators — without bees, we wouldn't have any food! 

6. Flours of different kids are good, like wheat, oat, almond meal or rice flours, depending on where in the world you are.

7. Nuts of whatever kind you can find and afford. Some nuts are really expensive, but all nuts are extremely versatile so in most cases, you can sub for what you can find and what is most plentiful in your area.

8. Seeds like sunflower, sesame and pumpkin seeds

9. Onions, red, yellow, green, leeks, small and big 

10. Garlic —  different kinds, and try to get the non-extra-white one, as it's most likely bleached! There’s a world of garlics out there. Russian red is a favorite, elephant garlic is impressively gargantuan, and a very fun rainy day activity is roasting up a series of different ones, putting them next to a bowl of golden silky olive oil and some toasted bread, and having a garlic taste test. 

11. Lemons, limes and citrus of all types to brighten up your dishes

12. Vinegars like apple cider, balsamic and red wine vinegar 

13. Soy sauce or Tamari, either soy or mushroom-based

14. Coconut milk and/or coconut flakes: you can often find this in tin cans, bricks or powders, and it is good to have on hand.

15. Fresh ginger root; not only is it soooo tasty, it's very good for you too!

16. Some kind of legume like lentils or chickpeas are great to have on hand, either dry or in cans, as they can be a very quick base for all sorts of other vegetables.

17. Grains and pseudograins (things that look like grains but are not actually in the grain family) like kasha, quinoa, different kinds of rice (red, black, brown, wild, jasmine etc) to make filling bases or to add to soups

18. Plain flour, or specialty ones such as rice of chickpea for gluten-free — you can use this to make many yummy things, from fresh pasta to pizza and cakes.

19. Dried fruits such as apricots, raisins and figs; these are great for healthy snacking, popping in cakes and cookies along with making granola for a protein-packed breakfast.

20. Dried herbs and spices, like nuts, differ in price and variety depending on your location. We curated a list below to get you started, but spices really are the magic sidekicks for making anything shine!

And here’s a recipe for the road (it’s also one of the kid-friendly ones, as we encourage collaborative cooking in the book with the whole family!):

Get cooking with carrots!

Activating Change for the Circular Economy

By Leyla Acaroglu

ACTIVATING THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY

Every time we purchase something, we are essentially voting for the kinds of things we want in the world. It’s through our purchase preferences, as individuals, as governments and as organizations, that we can encourage or discourage industries, services and products based on what we want to see continue. This is where there is great opportunity for change, as many of the products and services that fill our economy today have huge impacts on the planet, offer up many inequities along the supply chain and are designed to break.

We already have so much of the knowledge on what needs to be done to change this status quo. Scientists in the fields of life cycle assessment, environmental impact assessment, systems dynamics and consequential impact assessment have been knowledge building for years, contributing to the rising shift toward a circular economy movement. A change in the way we design and deliver everything.

Thanks to all this work, we now have a much stronger understanding of the potential negative outcomes of our actions before we even take them, and we can avoid unintended consequences if we approach problem solving through systems and life cycle thinking.

Gaining this foresight allows us to integrate sustainability into design products and across business models, policies and services. What we need right now is the normalization and integration of these approaches into the things that make up our economy. We have an incredible opportunity right now to catalyze this change, and this requires pioneering leadership from governments and CEOs, as well as the creative thinkers who can help shift the status quo.

We can speed up the change by offering up new ideas, incentivizing producers to approach product design differently and encouraging policymakers to change the dominant linear system. We can amplify sustainable design approaches and life cycle assessment in order to help green supply chains and find unique ways of shifting the status quo on hyper-consumerism through the implementation of product service system models.

Small choices, replicated many times, contribute to big impacts. This applies to all of our choices. Our world is made up of individuals operating as a collective whole. Through systems thinking, we understand the macro and the micro, the parts and the wholes. This thinking helps us gain a deeper understanding of our impacts and the power of influence that we all possess.

Many of the ecological impacts, the externalities that we see in the economy, have come about as a result of supply chain relationships — not just the end of life destination where things end up. Yet, much of our investment and activation is around waste management, rather than on designing out waste from the start.

Recently I released a new handbook called Design Systems Change where I lay out the opportunities for activating our own agency to effect positive change. In the past I have written Circular Systems Design and the Disruptive Design Method Handbooks, all designed to support people in the transition to a circular, regenerative and sustainable economy by design. In thinking deeply about these issues for many years, I have come up with a new proposition, one where the interaction of new value propositions is prioritized in the decision making process.

Integrating value into the circular economy From the Design Systems Change Handbook

Designing Change

We should (and can) be designing products, services and systems that embed the avoidance of waste through their design, instead of designing things with no regard for their consequences and then trying to design services to deal with the waste and impacts they’ll cause.

We need to move rapidly to a post disposable society. The circular economy is helping to make this happen, influencing shifts in the finance sector and in the design of products and services we all rely on. Big players in industry and government are pioneering product-system services that will help to move us away from single-use products and systems to closed loop ones.

I hope and predict that within 5 years, the pioneering companies at the forefront of this shift will have transitioned away from single-use products toward more integrated closed-loop systems that maintain and increase value throughout the system and are designed to dramatically reduce the environmental and social burden that disposability results in.

Not only is this good for the planet, but also it makes good business sense. In an increasingly resource-constrained environment, we have to find ways of reducing supply chain costs, and there are many creative ways to do this while benefiting the planet. 

The opportunities are on the horizon — we just need more activated minds willing to pioneer capturing them. In order to support people in pioneering this transition, I developed the Disruptive Design Method as a scaffolding support tool that guides decision makers through the process of understanding a complex problem, exploring the systems dynamics and then building creative interventions to design positive change.

Embracing Change

Think for a moment of all the ways change occurs in our day-to-day lives. We change our addresses, our music tastes, locations, underwear, ideas, partners, schools, nationalities, cars, governments, jobs, clothes, perspectives, money, the subject... and our minds. We change and reinvent ourselves constantly. We change the world around us and ultimately, we change the planet through the things that we choose to do, and perhaps more importantly, the things that we choose not to do. 

Many of these changes are brought about somewhat organically, even unconsciously, with life events and individual circumstances dictating many of the changes that we make. This approach is no longer enough. 

Conscious observers everywhere are noticing that an individualistic approach to change has dangerous consequences. We see the evidence of this culminating in the major issues at the forefront of global conversations: climate change, renewable energy, refugee crises, to name just a few. 

So how do you go about it when you want to intentionally, proactively affect change? How does that differ from our natural evolution… and where do you even begin in a change making practice? 

Change is everywhere - and always has been

In 500 BC, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus proposed that “the only constant in life is change,” that “stability is an illusion,” and, in his opinion, “there is a constant universal flux.” If, as Heraclitus says, change is constant, then it is also chaotic – “an inescapable paradox, yet a beautiful necessity, critical to all life.”  

We are all changing constantly, and the world is changing around, and with, us. The word change means to ‘make’ or to ‘become different,’ no matter if we’re talking about objects, people, or the natural world. Change encompasses all these, although they develop at varying speeds, be it constant, progressive, static, fast or slow.  

Failure Happens… and It’s a Good Thing!  

At the UnSchool, we approach making change as a state of being. We believe that being change-centric is a way of defining an agenda, the objective, and outcome to effect positive social change in and through the things that we do. 

This change-centric approach is a cultivated one, in which you have to work at wanting to make change. It’s not always easy; making change can definitely hurt sometimes and often requires some measure of failure along the way. How would we have evolved as a species, had we not experienced millions of years of failure and accidents? 

Failing hard and fast early on creates better, stronger results later. In saying this, it should also be noted that change is also one of the easiest things to make happen... if you have the right tools and resources, which you will receive when you engage in our classes, programs and content.  

Systems at Play in Change Making 

Everything is interconnected, so if we want to make change, we have to know how to understand those dynamics as a whole system and as parts of a whole system. When we look at the world through a change-centric lens, we first need to figure out if it’s structural or individual – is it personal or social forces that influence change? 

Social practice theory suggests that our agency for change lies in the influencers of social conditions. Anthony Giddens, one of the most prominent modern sociologists, proposed the theory of structuration. This theory explores the duality of structure where we continually make, and remake, ‘normal society’ through our routine actions and practices. 

Giddens suggests that social constructs influence the individual to a degree that choice is empowered by the practice, rather than the individual. Basically, we are influenced by social forces as well as personal choice-making. Behaviors are habits perpetuated through routine, which are either decided on consciously, or are subtly influenced by society at large. 

It boils down to this: in order to make change, one needs to consider the personal, social, and political systems at play and seek to intervene at different points.  

---

JOIN MY MONTH LONG MASTERCLASS

JUNE 1ST-30TH, 2020

THIS PROGRAM IS LIVE, ONLINE, TWICE A WEEK FOR A FULL MONTH, AND INCLUDES 1 POST-PROGRAM MENTORSHIP MEETING WITH LEYLA

#StayPositive Brain-Boosting 30-Day Challenge

On April 1st we started our 30-Day Brain-Boosting Challenge to help get people motivated to stay positive, make change and develop their agency to get cool shit done for a positive, regenerative and sustainable future.

You get daily dosses of content and you can still sign up here, but we also thought why not share some highlights from the program with you today to help you activate your agency and #staypositive! In today’s journal, we have included some content from three of the daily sessions, which are delivered in “Watch” “Read” and “Do” segments each day.

DAY 1: AGENCY

Let's look at how to activate agency for ourselves and in others by working on identifying and expanding your sphere of influence. The first part of the Design Systems Change Handbook goes into this in great detail, and here is the summary version. 

Agency is the capacity of an individual to take action in a particular environment. For most of our lives, we are taught that we don't have impacts on the world around us. An agentized individual, however, is aware of their influence and the dynamic relationship they have with the world. 

Every action we take or don't take has an impact: the things we buy, the conversations we have, the air we breathe - it all has an impactful relationship with the world.

Your agency is about your capacity to act independently and make free choices. These choices are affected by your worldview and the way you see yourself, formed through your experiences with the world, society in general and the things you chose to learn. 

Social structures and circumstances have a huge impact on one's agency, and the life you are born into can increase or decrease your “given” agency. Many of these social structures and circumstances are out of our control, yet they have a huge impact on our agency. The most critical thing is how you interpret your experiences and what they do to your sense of self. Thankfully, we are also seeing seismic shifts in access to the resources that support individual agency development.

Design science pioneer Buckminster Fuller said, ”Call me trimtab,” (it’s even engraved on his tombstone) because he, like many other changemakers, identified that the smallest part of the system can make the biggest change. A trimtab is a tiny part inside the rudder at the back of a large ship. When the ship’s steering wheel is moved, the tiny trimtab shifts in direction and (re)directs the whole trajectory of the ship. Often, the smallest part of the system can move the biggest parts.

This analogy is important to consider when thinking about your personal sphere of influence and the agency that you have to make change in the world around you. Many people fall into the trap of deflecting responsibility to others or blaming the large obvious parts of the system, deferring change to elements that they have little control over. But it’s often the small inconspicuous parts that have the most power and influence over the system dynamics to affect change. Our job is to identify them and unlock their potential. 

Integrity (especially as we deploy what agency we have and develop) is the backbone of our sense of self. It is about having a moral stand that you can refer to and being “whole” or complete when you come to making decisions. As author C.S. Lewis says, integrity is "doing the right thing, even when no one is looking.”  

Expanding Your Personal Agency 

Developing agency goes hand in hand with developing a firm adherence to a set of values, honesty to yourself and the world around you. Fundamentally, it’s a code of conduct or moral compass that you use to set up your practice and govern your decisions as you grow your sphere of influence in the world. 

Individuals who have a strong sense of personal agency believe events are a result of the actions they take, and they praise or blame themselves and their own abilities. Those who see agency external to themselves will praise or blame external factors. For example, someone with a strong sense of personal agency will credit their study habits for passing a test, whereas someone else may attribute their success to the teacher or the exam. Likewise, if they don’t do well, the person with the stronger sense of personal agency will blame themselves rather than the teacher or exam (Carlson, 2007)*.  

*Carlson, N.R., Buskist, W., Heth, C.D. and Schmaltz, R., 2007. Psychology: the science of behaviour-4th Canadian ed.

---

DAY 2: REFLEXIVITY AND REFLECTION 

Reflexivity is all about mental flexibility, which entails continuing to learn at the edge of comfort when it comes to understanding things, advancing your ability to think in and around something, and not just seeing things from only one perspective, but honing the ability to think from multiple different vantage points. 

You will benefit immensely from developing a super strong reflective thinking muscle that supports you in your ability to gain deeper insights into the way the world works, how you interact with it and how this can develop your agency. 

Self-reflection, divergent and non-linear thinking skills, hypercomplexity and reflexivity all involve asking a significant number of questions and fostering a deep sense of curiosity about the world around you. It is about assuming you don't know something until you know enough to know it. Whereas many people seek to avoid things they don't know, instead we relish in the fact that there are always new things to uncover. 

This is a lifelong practice, something that you develop over time, with consideration and connection to your inner self. Where reflection is the act of thinking back on something and gaining insights from the vantage point of hindsight, reflexivity is about a more dynamic, intimate and developed self-awareness, fostering the ability to think in and through something, rather than just look back on it after the fact. 

Reflexivity thus is about the circular relationships between cause and effect, especially when it comes to human belief structures. A reflexive relationship goes both ways, where we see cause and the effect both affecting each other in a dynamic relationship, rather than just seeing one part of the connection. You develop the ability to see what happens when an action is taken, and likewise you can see what would happen if you didn't take an action. 

Through this, we can see ourselves as part of the systems we are interacting with, instead of seeing ourselves apart from them. While reflection helps us learn from the past, reflexivity gives us tools to extract information from the moment we are in and the ones we will enter into. 

A high level of social reflexivity, for example, is defined by an individual having the ability to shape their own norms, tastes, politics and desires, and it is very much connected to the ability for one to identify their own agency and exert actions that connect to the advancement of one's influence on the world.

Reflection is a very useful daily practice tool that enables us each to see inside and gain insights into ourselves, which in turn enables us to grow personally and professionally. But to reflect on the world is equally as important. Tools like observing and recognizing bias, alongside learning to love problems and shifting mindsets, are all part of the tool set of positive, practical, proactive changemaking (and all of which we will explore over the coming days). 

---

DAY 3: SPHERE OF INFLUENCE

Your sphere of influence is the space in which you have the ability and power to change things. 

The idea that one person can save the world is not very agentizing, as it either encourages people to deflect responsibility for change to that one magical “other,” or it puts an immense burden onto the shoulders of those who want to be involved in the changes and expects them to influence the entire world. What instead is so much more useful is for us all to understand, no matter who we are, that each and every single one of us change the world every day through our actions. We all exert influence over the worlds we inhabit.

The things we buy, the food we eat, the jobs we do, the way we move around — these all have profound impacts on the natural environment, the economy, and society. Unfortunately, many of our actions result in flow-on effects throughout the system, which are often invisible to us and result in some form of unsustainability. The perpetuation of this blind participation in changemaking is one of the major issues we face. That's why there are movements to change the way we design, produce and consume everyday things so that their impact via our actions is lower. The movement toward a circular and regenerative economy is well underway, and this challenge pack you are engaging with is designed to help you discover your agency and role in this bigger picture. 

The decision to be involved in change, be it in your personal or professional life, starts by discovering how to activate your personal agency (which we have been looking at), identifying the sphere of influence you uniquely hold (today's topic) and then adopting the tools that will enable you to expand that influence and activate your creative potential to engage with change (content covered over the next 3.5 weeks!).  

Your sphere of influence is the space that you hold court over, combined with the knowledge you have, the people and communities you engage with, and the integrity you hold (which often translates to how much others value your knowledge, etc). Your sphere of influence is also the scope of the potential impact that your actions may or may not result in. 

When we are kids, our sphere of influence is small, often restricted to our families, but it's potent because we often wield quite a bit of influence over them at this stage in our lives. Then, as a young adult, we expand to have a more significant influence on our friends and peer group (as they do on us), and this slowly grows out to colleagues and partners and then our own kids and others as time and experiences and life advancements give us more agency and influence over the space we hold. The influence that we can each have is based on the amount of agency we cultivate and the integrity we build in ourselves over time. I will note here there are many structural forces that can restrict some and enable others. This is an entirely different topic, and we will discuss aspects of it later on — I just didn't want it to go unsaid that the lack of equity when it comes to certain resources does greatly restrict some people. 

That being said, there is a reality that every agent in a system impacts it. Every action we each take or don't take will have an impact (good, bad and all the options in between) —  the things we buy, the conversations we have, the air we breathe, the things we post online — these all have an impactful relationship on us and on the world, as everything is interconnected. The domino, butterfly or flow-on effect reminds us that our actions have impacts. Both “bad” and “good,” intentional and unintentional, everything we do in this big complex system has an effect on something else, and if you identify your agency and sphere of influence, then you are in a unique position to have an intentionally positive impact with the intent to change the systems around you, as you will be enabled to see yourself within the systems and work within its dynamics. 

An agentized individual is aware that they have influence and that their dynamic relationships with the world they inhabit are influencing them, too. 

By working on identifying and expanding your agency and sphere of influence over time, no matter how few resources you have, you can find creative ways to leverage this into new ways of effecting positive change. The world has seen this time and time again — the smallest part of the system can, if positioned right, effect the most significant change. 

That's why it's so exciting to see that we are all in the middle of a great movement toward change. There are many people the world over redefining their lives so that they, too, can participate in the world with more purpose and contribute back to the planet and their communities. And I assume you are one of them too!

A sphere of influence does not just tally up the number of people you know or the social network you have, although these are important in some cases of social influence (and important for personal connections). The key thing to influence is the integrity you hold and the trust that others have in your ability to influence within the space you hold. 

FURTHER READING

• A quick summary of identifying who's in you your sphere of influence here

• Read about the concept of Locus of Control here 

• Read this paper on sphere of influence and ecological problems 

Alumni Sri Iyer: Behaviour Research, Literacy & Gamification

Sri Iyer

Sri is social behavior change strategist, design explorer, researcher, collaborator and writer who joined us first for a DDM workshop in Sydney, and then later joined the team for our Mumbai Fellowship.

During the Mumbai Fellowship, she shared a session on gamification and ethical research with the cohort as part of the week’s experience. We caught up with her recently to find out what she has been doing since 2018, and here she shares her recent work.

Sri leading her session at the Mumbai fellowship

Can you give us an introduction to yourself and your work?

I work at the confluence of behavioral research, design, art and writing. I do three things, all circling around society and human behavior:

1. I independently collaborate with corporations, startups, conglomerates, ministries and NGOs on human behavior transformation projects. I use behavioral science, design and systems thinking for this purpose.

2. I write about being social and am more interested in exploring everyday practices and taboo topics.

3. I create artistic zines related to wildlife and our practices with nature.

Sessions with Sri

What motivates you to do the work that you do?

I am naturally curious about people and their practices. I am curious about why we do what we do. I find it difficult to operate without understanding self in such a manner.

I realize that these learnings from my curiosity can be constructively and disruptively put to use, to make ours and others' lives better. This motivates me to do what I do.

How did you find out about the UnSchool, and what motivated you to come?

My then-approach to problem solving was struggling to comprehend the dynamics of interconnected systems. I was, therefore, seeking to learn systems thinking, and I came across the UnSchool workshop in Sydney.

I liked the disrupting attitude of the school of thought and decided to learn systems thinking from the UnSchool.

What was your experience at the UnSchool like?

Stimulating!

What was the main take away you had from coming to the UnSchool?

At the workshop, it was that systems thinking tools could be used single-handedly by an individual. They don't necessarily need teamwork.

As a co-host in Mumbai, it was a) the importance of identifying, acknowledging and managing group dynamics while facilitating, b) a peek into how to make group interactions experiential. 

Tell us more about your initiative(s), and how is it all going?

The few initiatives I am looking out for are:

1. Gamifying training modules for industry/construction laborers and lorry drivers who are illiterate to semi-literate

2. An organizational experiential workshop intended to transform behaviors to being sensitive to self and other

3. Advising a team of architect-developers to design evidence-based built environments, so as to enhance well-being, creative thought and productive energy among its occupants

How did the UnSchool help you start/evolve it?

UnSchool helped me by giving me the confidence to play with big interconnected ecosystems. It has given me confidence and also helped me identify my process and style in designing experiences.

Whenever I use the systems maps or design experiences, Leyla's vibe rings in my ears. In a way, envisioning her motivates me and lets me know that I am doing it right.

How have you amplified this change you do in the world?

I’m still figuring it out. Meanwhile, I write about projects, processes and impact, and I attend some worthy conventions to talk about the use of behavioral science and systems thinking for problem-solving. Both are generating noise, conversations and network.

Prototyping session with Sri

How can people engage with, support, or follow your work?

I am an independent collaborator. I always welcome conversations and collaborations. One can approach me here:

LinkedIN
Instagram
Twitter
Medium

Inspired by one of my projects on adolescent sexual health, I am writing a book for adolescent boys and girls. It is aimed to be a reference guide for respect, consent, quality, self-determination and agency. I am seeking a mentor and/or funder for this endeavour!

Any other thoughts you want to share?

Most of my work is work in progress, and I am looking forward to where this is taking me.

#StayPositive: Social Distancing is Doing Some Good for the Planet!

How’s everyone holding up out there? No doubt with less physical things to do, and all that time saved from not being able to travel anywhere (not even to work!), you’ve likely seen the reports coming out about how social distancing is impacting the world in some surprisingly positive ways. From satellite images showing pollution drops over China and Italy, to clearer water running through the Venice Canal (and dolphins swimming through, albeit wishful thinking), it’s easy to see that limiting our non-essential activities, adopting work-from-home habits, and staying home more is giving our shared home, planet Earth, a much-needed breather as well.

So much so that in this article about plummeting emission and air pollution rates, scientists say that this year “by May, when CO2 emissions are at their peak thanks to the decomposition of leaves, the levels recorded might be the lowest since the financial crisis over a decade ago.” To be honest, we were also just fascinated by the contribution that decaying leaves have to CO2 emissions!

Additionally, NASA has released images showing the significant drop in air pollution above countries that have quarantines from COVID-19. 

Photo credit: NASA

Rebound effects

All of this has comes, though, with a secondary warning. When we do resume normal activities and people start to venture back out all over the world en mass, the carbon emissions and pollution levels could rise back up rapidly. This is not just because of the increase in transportation, but also because of a compensating attempt to ramp-up production and the desire to get back to “normal”, along with stimulus spending intended to jump-start the economy (which, as a reminder, is measured in GDP, a systems failure, because it doesn’t account for any impacts against Earth’s natural resources!). In fact, following the closure of many Chinese factories, and the recent reopening, air pollution levels are already on the rise again in China. This also matters a lot right now, as some scientists have said that air pollution could be one of the triggers for making the coronavirus worse.

Transport options matter when it comes to climate change

So, what if we start making the case now for actually continuing some of these social distancing practices that we expeditiously adopted during the past month? No, we’re not suggesting continuing on with full lock-down; freedom is vital — but what about changing the way we commute to work or run our businesses?

Individual Actions

There is an enormous opportunity for companies to widely adopt more work-from-home or flexible travel policies following this pandemic — and for individuals to advocate for it too. Take the fact that for most Americans, their transport biggest emissions impact is in their daily drive to work. Even if companies don’t go totally remote, it could make a substantial difference to implement more remote work policies and cut down on flights for meetings, conferences, trainings, etc. 

Pulling out some of the actions we’re all learning to adjust to right now may offer us some great new sustainable lifestyle and workplace options after we get through this chaos. 

Perhaps one of the most powerful amplification points here is in the illumination that yes, individual actions do collectively make a difference. If it’s every person overbuying loo roll, or baby carrots for that matter, everything we each do attributes to a bigger system wide impact. To be clear, this isn’t a scapegoat attempt to place the responsibility of creating a sustainable future solely on individuals (Leyla writes about this really well in her new handbook Design Systems Change), but more so encouragement to believe in the power of individual agency as it pertains to everyday actions. Even though it may seem that we currently have no control over the outcomes in relation to this pandemic, a quick mindset shift can showcase exactly how much control we do have over environmental impacts through the actions we do or do not take on a daily basis. This was the basis for our collaboration with the UNEP, the Anatomy of Action, in which we assessed the power lifestyle swaps across food, stuff, movement, money, and fun — all of which are being significantly disrupted by the current coronavirus outbreak.

Rethinking habits

In recent weeks and even days, you’ve likely had to rethink your daily eating habits as restaurants have shut down and many panicked shoppers cleared shelves of food. You have had to change the way you communicate with loved ones and colleagues. We’ve seen people rethink how to have fun and be social, how to care for others, with an uptick in spending time on personal hobbies and engaging in funny, creative video chats, dance parties, remote happy hours, yoga classes, and endless live streams on Instagram. Every area of our lives has experienced significant, rapid change — and we’re figuring out how to deal with that day by day. Imagine if we could do this for dealing with another existential threat — climate change! Or take this time to figure out the positive benefits that a slower world has on the systems that sustain us.

Discover more at online.unschools.co

So maybe, we can also take this rare pause from our usual busy hustle to take a long hard look at how out of alignment our current habits and global systems have been with the Earth’s systems that sustain us all. Instead of reacting to the next *insert catastrophic event here*, we can take a proactive approach to making the future work better for us all through shifts in our everyday habits.

One of the big things we always talk about at the UnSchool is that there is no failure — only opportunities to gain new knowledge that informs our actions for the future. That new knowledge is here, and it’s offering us the right set of circumstances to amplify our collective superpowers through the unstoppable force of individuals activating their agency.

What habits can you commit to continuing to help build a sustainable, regenerative future,  once “normal” life resumes?